Vertex is a powerful, and highly customizable tax engine.

Vertex provides testing and reporting tools to understand why an outcome occurred. If a desired result is not achieved, then the testing and reporting tools can be used to ascertain what caused the unexpected tax result. These tools also help to identify a root cause that needs to be addressed. These tools helped our company address specific taxability overrides we wanted to apply for certain a specific billing system but not for another.

Our company has completed several acquisitions in the recent past and Vertex has scaled with our company's resulting growth. Vertex allows much of our company's taxability configuration to be stored at various levels (e.g. division, company, parent, etc.). As a result, our company can apply certain configuration that applies across our portfolio of businesses but also introduce new configuration or customization as needed where a certain business might be unique.

Vertex has a fairly simple and intuitive user interface. Navigating the system to understand the impact of various customizations can get fairly complex, but that is a natural consequence of having a highly customizable tax engine. Vertex does a nice job of organizing various customization tools in its UI. Vertex can be very simple to use when a company's setup does not require a high level of customization.

Vertex is well suited for companies that may have one or many unique taxability scenarios were customization is required. There can be several ways for Vertex to accommodate a special situation (e.g. whether related to a customer, product, state, etc.). I rarely find that Vertex is a limiting factor at achieving a desired taxability result - oftentimes the limitation comes from the ERP/billing system. Vertex can be less appopriate for very niche products or services where a taxability category is not offered.