The Vertex Corporate Tax Innovation Awards recognize forward thinking organizations that have discovered inventive ways to leverage their Vertex Solutions to overcome real-world business issues. Vertex is pleased to acknowledge Nordstrom Inc., Elekta, HCA Inc. and Weatherford as this year's winners.

Nordstrom Inc.

Interfacing transactions from five point-of-sale systems and one purchasing system, creating a process to include an interstate deduction and a bad debt deduction, and overall data management proved challenging for Nordstrom.

With the implementation of Vertex® O Series® at one of their five Point of Sale systems and the implementation of Vertex® Sales Tax Returns™ with all systems, Nordstrom is overcoming these challenges and creating an efficient and accurate sales tax compliance system.

The ability to map product types to Vertex rules has saved a tremendous amount of time in updating Nordstrom’s system for tax law changes and sales tax holidays. It has also improved accuracy in many product decisions especially in the service area. Working with Vertex, Nordstrom was able to correct several reporting errors that were unknown prior to implementation, especially in the area of sales tax versus retailer’s use tax. The company has been able to create accurate databases for store locations, legal entities and products, and has developed processes to update their ever-changing environment.

 

Elekta

In order to accommodate line item taxing and properly calculate sales tax, Elekta needed to create a new process to extract data from the customer master and item master areas of Movex and pass that information into Vertex Sales Tax O Series. However, to the best of their knowledge, Elekta knew of no other company that had successfully implemented such a work around. So, to avoid modification of Movex by an outside consultant, the decision was made to modify the Vertex query that would pull the appropriate information.

This involved initialing rewriting the Java code that “talks” to Movex.  Then, Elekta used Vertex Tax Assist to split the product field – consisting of the item number and tax code into the designated fields allowing for accurate tax calculation and taxability decision. Performing the modifications in-house precluded the need to have outside consultants make modifications to Movex, saving Elekta thousands of dollars.

HCA Inc.

HCA Inc. needed to overcome challenges with disparate financial systems and the complexity of medical item taxation. By working with the support of Financial and Operations management, the tax department was able to automate the recalculation of taxes charged by vendors and automatically accrued taxes, code more than one million medical items into less that 500 tax categories, and link the purchasing and contract systems to keep them current with new or retired products.

These process improvements along with Vertex® Q Series® has allowed HCA to continually reduce the amount of sales and use taxes paid by more than $11 million annually; reduce the number of voucher lines requiring Accounts Payable review by 90 percent; allow consistent and accurate tax calculation across multiple jurisdictions and legal entities; and provide easy access to reliable data that can be used for planning and audit management thus reducing the amount of external consulting fees.

 

Weatherford

Weatherford’s sale and service offerings are specific and often unique in nature. To ensure proper tax determination, Wetherford’s service offerings required that some modifications be made to selected rules provided by Vertex O Series.

Weatherford has found that their customer billing in their Service/Rental module in JD Edwards encounters difficulty determining an accurate tax since invoices often include sales, rental, and service terms all on one invoice. Depending on jurisdictional tax laws, correctly taxing the items on the invoice can be extremely difficult particularly if jurisdictions are taxing the same item differently. By developing user created rules that fit their specific business transactions, Weatherford is now able to apply tax codes based on rules pertaining to a specific jurisdiction.

This results in having the appropriate tax applied to the invoice. Weatherford estimates that this innovation has reduced assessments by at least 50 percent since the time of implementation, which translates into tremendous savings, probably in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. An added bonus – the tax department has eliminated hundreds of hours of work making tax decisions manually.