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Solid tax engine that could use more customization options
August 22, 2018

Solid tax engine that could use more customization options

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Vertex Indirect Tax O Series

Overall Satisfaction with Vertex

Vertex O Series is being used by our US-based warehouses to calculate tax on sales orders and sales invoices.
  • Tax content for food-related products is more in line with our business than tax content from competing tax engines.
  • Tax calculation is fast.
  • Custom tax content is managed through tab-delimited text files, which is easier to manage than XML files.
  • Migration of custom tax content between environments is a messy, manual process. Some competitors can do this with simple point-n-clicks.
  • The transaction tester built into Vertex O is user-unfriendly. Some competitors have a much more intuitive testing tool.
  • Custom "if..then" statements can ONLY be built via drag-n-drop (one component at a time), while typing these statements would be easier for experienced users. The custom "if..then" functionality is more restrictive than that of some competitors.
  • Too early to say, as ours is a new installation. Most of our time with Vertex O has been in the incubator.
We had prior experience with one competitor and had major problems with that vendor's support of their software. The company didn't seem to be interested in doing much to improve their product after acquiring the company that originally built the tax package.

Nobody had as accurate tax responses (according to what we expect the tax responses to be) for food products sold to other businesses in the USA.

Vertex, on paper, had more options for customization than its competitors. In practice... not so much. They also offer integration software that no other vendor has; this software would be helpful to some companies, depending on how they need to integrate with a tax engine.
  • In-house ERP
  • Home-grown support tools
Integration was rough for two reasons:

1. Our in-house ERP had no existing programs for building XML, performing web service calls, or parsing XML. It had to be written 100% from scratch. Vertex integration with standard ERP software should be fine, but our ERP is home-grown.

2. Vertex O uses SOAP, not REST, for web services. REST is a selling point of some competitors. Our enterprise architects pushed back hard on buying Vertex O because of its requirement to use SOAP. I'm sure that SOAP is a factor in point #1 being so difficult. If we were integrating a tax package that uses REST, integration probably would have been less difficult.
1st level support is hit-or-miss. Higher level support is good. Consultants (if you paid for them) are very responsive, and the technical consultants are the best. Much better help from the technical consultants than from anyone else at Vertex or at our previous tax engine vendor.
Our in-house ERP was previously calculating sales tax, and its tax answers were probably right around 80% of the time, while Vertex O should be in the 95-98% range. In addition, our in-house ERP required manual updates to tax content in each of its 70+ servers. As a result, tax content was rarely updated and caused the "correct tax answers" percentage to trend downward over time.
As with sales people for all tax engines, Vertex limited exposure to their actual software and provided some more detailed documents (when we pressed for them) but with a lot of information redacted. Overall the sales people were more knowledgeable than their competitors, but I always prefer some time with technical people who will be less likely to hide the limitations of the software.
I would press for more details regarding the ability to customize the tax content. I would insist on hands-on time with the customization tools.
B2B sales of food items in the USA should get more accurate tax answers in Vertex O than in competitors' packages.

If you need to build creative custom tax content within a tax engine, consider other tax packages. Vertex O has some customization options, but they are far more limited than those of some competitors. Examples that Vertex O lacks: nested if..then statements, regular expressions in if..then statements, invoice-level user-defined fields, the ability to manipulate the contents of fields when splitting lines through allocations (subtract one value from another, hardcode a field to a certain text string, etc.).