Vertex is a use tax friendly program and has reduced our exposure in audits
October 30, 2019
Vertex is a use tax friendly program and has reduced our exposure in audits
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Vertex Indirect Tax O Series
Overall Satisfaction with Vertex
We are currently using Vertex O Series across our US organization in both our sales and purchasing modules of SAP. Vertex O Series has allowed us to more thoroughly and accurately report use tax and manage our customer exemption certificates throughout the US business.
- Vertex O Series makes it easier to verify if purchases are taxable or exempt. This allows our AP team to have more confidence in the accuracy of the invoices that are being presented by our vendors.
- The Exemption Certificate Management system is a much better way to track our customer's exemption certificates and their expiration. We are able to accurately pull reports that give us a list of customers we need to get updated certificates for months before they expire.
- The ability to access our Vertex O Series anywhere and anytime with our URL has allowed us to access any information needed while we are out of the office or at conferences. This allows greater flexibility for time away from the office since we can access it from any PC.
- Prior to using Vertex, our reports were very simplified but still contain the information needed to file sales/use tax returns. We do miss the simplified reports, however, we have adjusted to the Vertex Reports and how to use them. We still wish the reports were not so many pages to print.
- Creating tax assist rules seem like they should be easy, however, when you are doing it without the implementation help, it is somewhat difficult to remember which information is usable in which options.
- Due to the number of products that we have, we could not possibly map all of the products. So we decided to use material groups, however, we have found that many of the material groups were hard to match to taxability categories in Vertex. We had to do quite a bit of research to map things accurately. It would have been great to have more ways to map products to the taxability categories in Vertex. The categories do have a lot of content, but when your business is a very specific niche in the manufacturing world, it requires more research and business decisions had to be agreed on to get everything mapped correctly.
- Most significantly, the ROI for us was the reduction in audit costs and assessments from a variety of state and local audits.
- Vertex allows for consistent opportunities to improve our business processes which help us reduce exposure for audits.
- The support team for Vertex has been great at helping us work out any issues that we are unable to correct within our organization. This allows us to continue using and have confidence that the system will work when we need it to.
- The past year, there have been several times that have Vertex On-Demand has gone down and hasn't worked at all. This has a severe personnel cost to sit around until the system is up and running again. There is not really anything in our SAP environment that can be done without Vertex working.
- Product Features
- Product Reputation
- Third-party Reviews
The Tax Manager and Tax Director had several conversations with other members of their TEI group about Vertex. These conversations were encouraging to them and they liked the features that others had told them about. After many conversations, they engaged the sales group at Vertex to further research the O Series product.
We used Taxware prior to Vertex O Series. There are things about Taxware that we did like better than Vertex, however, Vertex is much easier to work through issues and find solutions that tax personnel can do instead of always needing to engage IT support. We selected Vertex O Series due to the ability it had to deal with use tax and avoid some exposure for those types of taxes.
- Our company does some very specific types of services throughout the US. Each state handles this service differently. We have been able to use several tax assist rules and lookup tables to manage the services by the state for reporting and billing. These allow us greater ability to have a report that will give us the information to report these types of sales accurately.
- We used tax assist and lookup tables to handle different rates for specific customers in a variety of states. This has allowed us to more easily report the different rate types easily since they appear on the reports in a specific way to easily identify them.
- We have had greater control over customer exemption/resale certificates and their expiration dates in Vertex than we have ever had before. It has also allowed us to get reports to our sales force 60-120 days before the expiration date so we can update them prior to expiration.
Vertex always provides us with exceptional support. Each time we have a type of issue, we do what we can from our side before we contact the support team. Each time we have dealt with the support team, it has been professional, helpful and very refreshing. The team never makes you feel dumb or that you should have known the answer. They will talk you through how to fix it so you can do it yourself next time.