Beyond the edge: introducing EdgeLink

In the fast-paced world of modern business, efficient, cost-effective and accurate tax management continues to be a challenge for many organizations. Juggling the requirements of tax, finance and IT teams often results in a tug-of-war between fulfilling strategic business goals and ensuring tax accuracy and compliance. This struggle is further complicated by the need to adapt to digital growth, maintain operational resilience and manage the constant changes in tax law. Vertex addresses these challenges head-on with the latest version of Vertex O Series Edge, which now includes EdgeLink.

EdgeLink allows tax technology teams to monitor and control their entire network of Edge endpoints from a single dashboard in the Vertex cloud easily and efficiently.

O Series Edge was originally released to move tax calculation close to the point of need. It creates highly resilient and high-performing localized tax calculation endpoints while providing a unified source to manage full tax configuration, audit records, compliance activities and data analysis. EdgeLink adds self-updating endpoints and centralized, on-platform management, fully completing the connection between the central system and tax calculation at the edge.

A tax engine, such as Vertex O Series, brings significant value to a tax department, centralizing and automating tax compliance management. Tax departments rely heavily on IT to ensure that outcome is consistent across all digital channels. Doing this well ensures that tax technology keeps up with the pace of business. EdgeLink empowers IT departments to deliver tax management to the edge, with minimal effort – ensuring customer checkouts are fast and accurate. The promise of high performance with a lower total cost of ownership provides incredible value. The following benefits are achievable with Edge and EdgeLink:

• Offline resiliency: Maximizing offline resiliency for in-store checkout keeps checkout lines moving without sacrificing omni-channel features or accuracy.
• E-commerce performance: Creating high-performance and highly scalable checkout for e-commerce operations ensures your site keeps taking orders even during the highest traffic times.
• High-availability backups: Creating high-availability backups allows critical back-office processes to finish on time without disruption.
• Remote cluster management: Installing, monitoring and maintaining multiple remote tax calculation clusters ensures updates from the tax department make it to production checkout on time, wherever you’re calculating tax.
• Centralized control: Centralized configuration and reporting for all local tax engines provides complete visibility and the ability to manage updates from a single location.
• Enhanced security: Controlling connectivity at every endpoint means sensitive processes can stay secure while connected processes continue to work.
• Infrastructure integration: EdgeLink works with existing infrastructure so there’s no need to change other components for a successful adoption.

All of this notably diminishes the IT team’s time and effort to manage tax systems, ensuring consistent uptime and freeing up resources to manage other projects. EdgeLink also enhances IT’s ability to deliver value to the tax and finance departments by improving accuracy and minimizing overall tax costs.

Ultimately, the goal of our new EdgeLink suite of features is simple: to redefine tax technology to align with ever-evolving business needs. It is built to remove friction points, offer more control and elevate your tax processing capabilities. With streamlined costs and maintenance, robust performance, flexible deployment and enhanced visibility via a central dashboard, EdgeLink strives to become the natural extension of a company’s tax technology, to the benefit of both the IT and tax departments. As a result, this allows more time for both departments to focus on strategic initiatives.

Our journey with EdgeLink doesn't end here—it’s just the beginning. Stay tuned for more insights and updates in the coming weeks. In the meantime, to learn more about Vertex O Series Edge and EdgeLink, visit our product page.