Tax Technology

The ecommerce boom has provided many online businesses with an opportunity to scale, with more and more sellers looking to trade across borders. Yet, the complexities surrounding indirect tax can threaten frictionless commerce. This may not only prevent growth but can also cause other challenges related to the systems and processes needed to make indirect tax touchpoints both compliant and efficient.

Vertex, a leading global provider of end-to-end indirect tax technology software, delivers trusted and comprehensive tax technology enabling businesses to make online transactions seamlessly, remain compliant, and support growth. In a nutshell, it enables businesses to trade without barriers. Its solutions can be tailored to specific industries for major lines of indirect tax, including sales and consumer use.

Vertex supports everything from customer location identification and indirect tax calculation, to invoicing and reporting, helping ecommerce businesses make seamless online sales in multiple countries and currencies. Whether it’s to accommodate an influx of transactions or to introduce products to new regions, here are some of the key features that makes the solution stand out amongst competitors:

• Continually updated tax rules and rates supporting latest regional and jurisdiction-specific tax requirements
• Customer location identification using multiple data points with evidence hierarchy determined by the merchant
• Business tax number validation to offer reverse charging to business customers where applicable
• Compliant invoices in local language according to country/region, as well as multiple options for invoice delivery and analysis
• Foreign exchange rate application for every transaction including rate source and time point
• Tax threshold monitoring to show online sales against tax threshold rules with notification alerts
• Country-by-country and multi-currency reporting to give businesses insight through data-driven dashboards

In January 2022, Vertex launched its O-Series Edge cloud solution to support businesses like retailers who need to process transactions anywhere, anytime, with no latency or dependencies on connectivity. Vertex O-Series Edge is an end-to-end solution that enables tax to be calculated locally, in-store, or in an e-commerce data centre to maximise performance and up-time while transactions are aggregated centrally for reporting and compliance.
With more and more retailers using distributed technology to manage indirect tax calculations and looking to minimise disruptions to the customer experience, O-Series Edge technology provides users around the world with a centralised on-premise tax engine with cloud functionality that can be deployed anywhere and scale as transaction volumes increase. This supports consistent, secure, and more accurate tax determination while increasing performance. The product helps retailers:

• Ensure the highest availability as deploying a tax engine using edge technology eliminates network connectivity and bandwidth issues. It also enables fast automated scalability to address increased demand on e-commerce websites, especially during peak traffic.
• Improved and consistent performance thanks to the use of edge containers since calculations can be done without an internet connection.
• Calculate tax locally with minimal friction while maintaining centralised control. Data and telemetry are streamed to the main hub for the central management of reporting, compliance, and maintenance.
• Deploy only the tax content needed for that location delivering greater efficiency.
• Security issues are minimised as transactions are processed and tax is calculated behind the company firewall, which reduces the amount of traffic going through.

SurveyMonkey faced difficulties in managing tax liabilities in over 190 different jurisdictions and across B2B and B2C markets. The online survey provider originally managed its VAT/GST collection, filing and remittance in-house, but teams were spending considerable time validating business numbers, and reports needed to be collected from multiple systems. Rapid business growth resulted in an increase in tax obligations with different tax authorities and made this approach unsustainable. Changes to the international tax environment, also meant that VAT/GST compliance alone was more complex. SurveyMonkey needed a scalable and flexible process that could streamline tax compliance across the sales process. Vertex delivered a robust tax solution that could be integrated into existing systems and didn’t require reconfiguration. Vertex’s tax specialists worked closely with the SurveyMonkey team to stay compliant with tax regulations and ensure that changes were reflected in the solution. This has made processes more efficient, reduced internal costs associated with compliance, and enabled the online survey provider to move into new markets.

“Vertex helps us to scale and grow as we move into new markets and assists us in achieving our growth targets in markets where indirect tax compliance may be a challenge.” David Burke, Director of Accounting & Finance at SurveyMonkey

“Vertex took the time to understand our business model and our indirect tax management challenges. As we expand into new territories, their expertise of the international indirect tax landscape is invaluable. The Vertex team has been extremely responsive to our requirements from the outset and is a true business partner who works with us to support our current and future needs from a tax perspective.” Françoise Thomas, Accounting Director, Ubisoft

https://www.vertexinc.com