Item: Vertex
Rating: 10
Author: Susan Laughrey

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

CONA is a service company that provides an IT platform for 12 Coca Cola bottlers. We have Vertex 7.0 installed as our tax calculation engine and it is bolted on to our SAP environment. We use the O Series for transaction taxes in North America (including Canada). This includes Sales and Use, VAT, Container deposits, CRFs, soft drink taxes, and Sugar-sweetened beverage taxes. We are able to handle multiple types of transaction taxes in one system. It saves time and money.

Pros and Cons

The O Series does a good job keeping the rates current for multiple tax types and fees.
The O Series has been quick to work with us on new tax legislation around soft drink taxes that get passed quickly and are implemented quickly.
The O Series support has worked well with us on our issues that require quick correction.

Some of the changes that were made to the qualifying conditions from the conditional rules caused us issues. We would have liked it if Vertex had continued to support the original conditional rule design but we have moved past that issue now.
We have had to create some of our own rules to accommodate the origin rules for soft drink taxes. We had hoped vertex would have been quicker to handle those.
We do still have issues with the return export file. The data is not always correct but we are working with support on this.

Return on Investment

We have been able to put 12 bottlers into a single system. Originally each bottler had their own systems and we now work in one central instance using the same rules.
We have been able to calculate all the transaction taxes that we are required to charge customers using one source of data. This provides data integrity for us and reduces the amount of manual maintenance were we required to calculate using alternative methods.

Key Differentiators

features
usability
product reputation
experience
reputation
existing
sales
analyst

We had a history with Vertex and realized that our business required a software that could handle our volume of data processed daily. We also knew that Vertex would be the only supplier that could handle all our tax types that we required. This included the deposits, fees, soft drink taxes etc.

Alternatives Considered

We considered internal and possibly Taxware or Sabrix. Internal would have required too much maintenance. Taxware just did not have the capability that we needed and their reputation was not as good. We also heard that Sabrix was not performing to customers' needs. We went with the O Series as we felt in the long term, they would grow with us and keep in step with our ever-evolving tax needs.

Innovative Uses

We calculate all transaction taxes in the soft drink industry.
We are able to calculate both DSD and FSV taxes with the same data using a different usage to attract the different rules

Product Configurability

The reconfigurability of the system is right for us. We do have complex needs but have been able to manage the rules and impositions that we create. We also use the tax assist and childlike features to create multiple units of measure for our beverage sales. We also like the Flex field capability.

Exceptional Examples of Vertex Support

We had an SIC issue after the recent patch applied to our system. We started experiencing incorrect tax postings on very high profile taxes. We worked with Geoff from the SIC support team and he spent alot of time working with me to hunt down the source of the issue. It was not a quick fix due to the nature of the correction, but the correction has worked perfectly and the bottlers are happy again.

Systems Integrated With

We have an interface from Certcapture to the O Series to create customers and exemption certificates.

Likelihood to Recommend

The content of Vertex is set up in a manner that works for our business. We can easily map to the rules and are able to make user changes easily. The tools for reporting in the O Series are beneficial to our bottlers. They can customize the reports to suit their needs and they like this flexibility. The partitioning feature was a must for us. We required a multi-tenant solution and the partition set up in the O Series provided our bottlers with the security they required and provided us the central repository that we needed for infrastructure and maintenance.

The beverage industry is pleased with O Series

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Vertex