O Series - Questions and Answers

It's a web enabled world. Is your tax solution?

According to a Gartner study, 75% of companies surveyed plan to use Web services for CRM, ERP or SCM initiatives. In fact, new releases from major ERP firms are based on this type of deployment.

Do you know your enterprise IT plans for Web services, ERP migration, or ERP consolidation?

Oracle, Peoplesoft and SAP have all moved into Web services for their new feature sets. Eventually, your IT department will plan for the migration to these new platforms, if they haven't already.

The Web services architecture supports deployment of products on an application server that can be separate from the business system server. This decoupling eliminates the requirement to simultaneously upgrade both ERP and O Series applications.

Don’t let the tax department be left out of consideration for this planning. Learn how Vertex can help you position tax compliance to be an essential piece of an enterprise move to new IT technology.

Do you need more visibility and control across business systems and platforms?

Do you support multiple ERP order entry systems for the calculation of sales and use tax? Have you integrated web store-fronts with one or more back-office ERP’s? Do your divisions each maintain their own Vertex Sales Tax solution?

Vertex O Series central tax server will let you integrate and manage disperse, complex, and heterogeneous systems through Web services to provide a better standard process at a lower cost of ownership.

Most corporate IT environments are a collection of systems that have been assembled through years of acquisitions, divestitures and internal growth. Setting corporate standards for IT hardware, Operating Systems, Relational Database Structures and other environmental parameters has been a daunting if not impossible task for IT managers.

Vertex O Series has been designed using technology platforms that maintain the highest performance standards while requiring the lowest degree of maintenance for the IT department. O Series was designed to work within your current IT environment rather than mandating costly and time consuming changes.

O Series utilizes Java, Java Server Pages, HTML, XML and SOAP. These technologies allow the software to run in a platform independent Web-based environment where all databases can be accessed via Java Database Connectivity (JDBC). The use of these technologies also enables O Series to operate with various types of applications, including financial, online and hosted applications.

Additionally, a centralized tax application server can be maintained by the Tax Department for all consolidating and affiliated entities. This allows for tax information to be dispersed to the entire organization in a uniform and consistent manner. Authorized users will be able to access the system through their web browser, eliminating the need for costly hardware setups or the need to apply software updates and patches to multiple instances of your calculation engines.

If you need to consolidate multiple systems or locations in order to file transaction tax returns, the centralization of O series can handle the task with ease.

Countless products, multiple jurisdictions, infinite taxability choices – How do you keep up?

Drawing on over twenty-five years of experience in sales and use tax, and building on our continuous research on state and local tax code, Vertex O Series provides accurate taxability decisions for products both sold and purchased.

Categories and subcategories of products are provided for those items that have been specifically identified by jurisdictions as nontaxable or eligible for special rates. By assigning product codes to these categories, correct taxability is applied. These rules are maintained by Vertex and delivered in the monthly updates to remove that burden from your tax group.

Maintaining tax compliance is not a simple process. Over 7,000 distinct tax jurisdictions exist at the state, county, city and district levels. While tax rates change close to 600 times per year, these changes are only one part of the compliance equation. The taxability of products and services can change based on a variety of complicated facts and circumstances. O Series helps minimize the time and expense spent researching the rates and rules that define your business.

Do your current processes support Sarbanes-Oxley compliance?

Vertex O Series solutions provide a standard process for determining taxability and rate, calculating tax, and transaction information that will help you support a Sarbanes-Oxley initiative.

O Series also provides access security and use activity logs that record time, date, and user for any change to the system. Historical archives of rules, rates, and exemptions to permit reconstruction of the taxability decision on a past transaction.