Vertex, Inc. (Vertex) operates as a provider of enterprise tax technology solutions. The company’s software, content, and services help customers stay in compliance with indirect taxes that occur in taxing jurisdictions all over the world.
Collectively, indirect taxes refer to taxes that are collected and remitted to the government by an entity other than the one being taxed. As an example, sales tax is paid by a person or entity that is purchasing a product or service, but it is collected and...
Vertex, Inc. (Vertex) operates as a provider of enterprise tax technology solutions. The company’s software, content, and services help customers stay in compliance with indirect taxes that occur in taxing jurisdictions all over the world.
Collectively, indirect taxes refer to taxes that are collected and remitted to the government by an entity other than the one being taxed. As an example, sales tax is paid by a person or entity that is purchasing a product or service, but it is collected and remitted by the company or entity selling that product or service. This contrasts with direct taxes, such as income tax, which are paid directly by the entity being taxed.
Indirect taxes, such as sales tax, use tax, and value-added tax (VAT) are complex. In the United States (U.S.) alone, Vertex tax content addresses indirect taxes for over 20,000 unique taxing jurisdictions.
Vertex helps companies with complex tax operations to automate their indirect tax processes. The company’s software, content, and services address the increasing complexities of global commerce and compliance by reducing friction, enhancing transparency, and enabling greater confidence in meeting indirect tax obligations. As a result, the company’s software is ubiquitous within its customers' business systems, touching nearly every line item of every transaction that an enterprise can conduct and enabling greater confidence in meeting indirect tax obligations by helping to mitigate the risk of non-compliance.
The company has over 4,900 direct customers, including the majority of the Fortune 500, and provides its customers with tax support in over 195 countries and territories. The company’s software enables tax determination, compliance and reporting, tax data management and document management, and analytics and insights with powerful pre-built integrations to core business applications used by most companies, particularly those applications that has a significant impact on global commerce transactions. The company’s software is fueled by over 900 million data-driven effective tax rules and supports indirect tax compliance in more than 20,000 jurisdictions worldwide. The company’s solutions can be deployed in the cloud, on-premises environments, or at the network edge, all with implementation services available to enable optimal customer outcomes and satisfy unique business requirements.
Solutions
The company’s Vertex solutions can automate the end-to-end indirect tax processes for all companies with complex tax operations and audit risk. The company’s software includes tax determination, compliance and reporting, tax data management and document management tools, analytics and insights, as well as pre-built integrations to major business applications.
Tax Determination
The company’s tax determination solutions enable real-time calculation of indirect taxes and applicable fees for sale and purchase transactions. This solution includes a powerful indirect tax calculation engine that applies rules-based logic from the company’s proprietary content database to determine taxability, identify precise taxing jurisdictions, and consistently apply the appropriate amount of tax to each transaction in real-time. The company’s solution supports determination for sales tax, consumer and seller use tax, VAT, communications tax, leasing tax, payroll tax, and lodging and occupancy tax.
Compliance and Reporting
The company’s compliance and reporting solutions enable the automation of signature-ready returns and remittance of indirect tax to appropriate jurisdictions. Companies use these solutions to leverage tax data files imported from Vertex or third-party applications to establish visible audit trails of tax determinations and user-made adjustments. The company’s solutions also include workflow management tools, such as calendar and document management, and role-based security and event logging, which supports its customers’ internal control over financial reporting and compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The company supports e-filing and print formats for returns, schedules, worksheets, tax reports and payment requests, and provide archiving and retrieval of all filings.
Tax Data Management
The company’s tax data management tools enable enterprises to unify transaction data from multiple business applications and sources. These solutions enable tax teams to view detailed transaction-level tax data, identify anomalies or errors, and establish necessary rules to address gaps in data and audit logs for any adjustments or corrections that has been made.
Document Management
The company’s document management solutions automate the validation and storage of, and tax audit support for, sales tax exemptions and reseller certificates, enabling enterprises to manage large quantities of documents, such as tax exemption certificates.
Analytics and Insights
The company’s analytics and insights tools improve data quality and provide data intelligence to optimize the end-to-end tax process and improve business outcomes.
Pre-Built Integrations
The company’s solutions are supported by a suite of powerful, pre-built integrations that enable real-time coordination between its solutions and major business applications, such as Adobe/Magento, Coupa, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, SAP Ariba, Shopify, Workday, and Zuora, among many others. Much more than traditional application programming interfaces, the company’s integrations include mapping data fields, business logic and configurations to improve the processing of transactions to and from its solutions. The majority of its integrations are designed, tested, and supported by the company. The company also allows for partner-developed integrations as part of a rigorous certification program.
Industry-Specific Solutions
The company offers a range of solutions that support certain industries that has specific indirect tax needs, such as retail, communications, and leasing. For example, the company’s retail solution supports omnichannel transactions spanning store kiosks, eCommerce websites, catalog sales, and mobile device transactions. The company’s communications solution supports the determination of taxes, surcharges, and fees affecting the U.S. providers of communication services, including wireless, voice-over-IP, satellite, internet, and video and audio streaming services. The company has pre-built integrations specific to the leading providers of business applications used by these industries.
Technology Specific Solutions – Chain Flow Accelerator, SAP-Specific Tools
The company offers a number of technology solutions that offer tools and enhancements to certain ecosystems, like SAP or Oracle, which are deeply integrated into their technology stack. For example, the company’s Chain Flow Accelerator tool allows configuration of tax specific flows within the SAP stack. In addition, the company offers an SAP specific tool set that provides customers the ability to maintain, analyze, and validate tax data in procure-to-pay, as well as sales and billing systems that enhance its usefulness for indirect taxes as well as other business applications.
Implementation Services
Due to the ubiquitous nature of the company’s software in its customers' technology environments, the company also offers implementation services to enables its customers to realize the full benefit of the company’s solution at initial deployment. These software implementation services include configuration, data migration and implementation, and premium support and training.
Managed Services
Customers can also license indirect tax returns outsourcing as a managed service for compliance in the U.S. and Canada. These managed services include indirect tax return preparation, filing and tax payment, and notice management.
E-invoicing
The company offers a global solution for the end-to-end e-invoicing process. The company’s solution enables organizations to optimize their real-time VAT reporting and e-invoicing processes for multiple countries to enhance continuous transaction controls and support direct reporting requirements. The company’s solution provides a single integrated platform to streamline the creation, submission, clearance, and e-archiving of e-invoices in compliance with jurisdictional mandates.
Tax Content
All the company’s software and solutions are underpinned by its proprietary content database, which supports over 900 million effective tax rules. The company’s content quality and accuracy are key components of its software subscriptions revenue and customer value and are supported by over 40 years of tax knowledge and experience. The company’s content quality and accuracy are critical to the longevity of its customer relationships. On a monthly basis, the company’s content team combines legislative research, analysis, technical logic, and automation to embed updated rules into its software. Unlike many enterprise software solutions where maintenance and support are focused solely on periodic technology upgrades, the company’s monthly updates are a critical element of allowing its customers to ensure that they are utilizing the latest tax changes to accurately calculate their indirect taxes.
Technology
The company’s software and solutions are built upon a robust set of technology capabilities designed for the flexibility, configurability, speed, and scale to handle complex tax scenarios and processing volumes, and interoperability across core business applications.
Real-Time Engine
The company’s real-time engine determines the appropriate tax rules to apply to a line item in a transaction through a sequence of real-time processes that combine tax algorithms and tax content with transaction line-item level detail. Combining tax content stored as structured data with sequencing and decision tree logic results in one or more individual tax rules that are applied to each line item in a transaction. This is built within memory and cached for performance. The in-memory processes of the core calculation engine are tuned to accommodate high-volume and complex transactions at speed and scale.
Configuration
The company’s solutions are built to be highly configurable. Through the company’s graphical user interfaces, users can configure and map their taxability to ensure the correct tax rules are executed. The company’s flexibility in configuration also extends to users who can create their own taxability rules, as appropriate. These user-defined taxability rules act as an override, providing flexibility to ensure that non-standard tax scenarios and processes can be addressed. Additionally, users can augment transactions entering and exiting the engine by building their own logic through the company’s drag-and-drop experience. This logic is saved to then execute within the engine.
Tax Geography
Accuracy in determining the appropriate taxation of a transaction depends on many factors, including detailed location information for where a transaction is occurring. The company designed and created a proprietary solution for tax jurisdiction identification that leverages industry geographic information system tools and geospatial data. With the company’s proprietary technology, it is able to create and map multiple tax jurisdictions for a particular location and assign a unique identifier to each location so that it can be used by the engine to allow for higher accuracy. This technology is highly relevant to emerging economic shifts, such as the sharing economy, where the physical nexus of transactions is unclear, such as ride-sharing services.
Security
The company’s application security framework allows its customers to define how users can interact with sensitive enterprise data and how they are authorized to use certain aspects of the company’s software. Users are mapped to a set of predefined roles, and the company provides its customers with the ability to create user-defined roles. User-defined role-based access can be defined on a screen-by-screen level and further refined with read and/or write privileges.
Cloud Solutions
The company provides cloud services from six geographically separate data centers located on two continents: North America and Europe. The data centers are paired for failover of operations to an alternate, geographically separate production facility in case any single data center becomes unavailable. All data centers are operated by leading vendors providing physical security, internet access, environmental controls, and data retention services.
Customers
The company’s customers include the majority of the Fortune 500, as well as a majority of the top 10 companies by revenue in industries such as retail, technology, and manufacturing, in addition to leading digital marketplaces. As of December 31, 2024, the company had 4,915 direct customers. While most of its revenue is generated by customers domiciled in the U.S., many of its customers are multinational organizations with global business operations. The company also provides tax software solutions outside the U.S., primarily in Canada and Europe. For the year ended December 31, 2024, approximately 8% of its revenue was generated outside of the U.S.
Growth Strategies
The key elements of the company’s strategy include the retention and expansion of revenues from existing customers; acquiring new customers; broadening and deepening its partner ecosystem; extending global footprint; and sustained investment in new product innovation.
Sales and Marketing
The company licenses its software and solutions primarily through the company’s direct and indirect sales organization, with a focus on enterprise and midmarket businesses that has complex tax operations. The company’s direct sales team consists of inside sales and field sales, supported by its technical pre-sales and services teams. Teams are organized by territory and company size. The company also has customer success teams focused on onboarding, usage, retention, renewals, and cross-selling additional products.
The company’s direct sales force leverages its partnerships with technology providers such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and Salesforce, and a growing network of system integrators to influence and drive growth opportunities. These partnerships can include certified integrations that drive ease of implementation and rapid time-to-value for the company’s joint customers. The company leverages its relationships with professional services firms such as Deloitte, PwC, Ernst and Young, and KPMG to drive tax software adoption in partnership with their tax advisory and tax technology practices.
The company also utilizes indirect sales to efficiently grow and scale its revenues. The company’s indirect sales team focuses on building relationships with leading system integrators who implement eCommerce and other platforms, and resellers who offer its software, services, and training to their customer networks. These partnerships allow the company to extend its demand generation and market reach efforts. The company also extends its reach efficiently through marketplaces and service providers who use the company’s technology to calculate tax and/or file tax returns for their end-customers.
The company’s marketing investments are focused on establishing and expanding its brand recognition, creating sales leads and growing the company’s customer relationships. The company generates sales leads through online and offline marketing channels, including search engine marketing, outbound lead generation, technology events and conferences, and digital marketing programs. Word-of-mouth referrals from the company’s customers, technology partners and consulting firms further scale its market reach. The company engages and grow its customer revenues through hosted events, customer advisory boards and user groups, and digital seminars. The company extends brand awareness through advertising, press coverage and social media, as well as through sponsorships of industry associations such as Tax Executive Institute, Council on State Taxation, and CPA.com.
Partners
The company partners ecosystem consists of multiple types of partners that provides it access to their customers and clients.
The company continued success is enabled by its seamless integration into customers’ business applications, gathering high-quality new customer leads, and collaborating with professional service providers to helps the company’s customers solve their specific tax needs. In addition to driving technological innovation and growing its range of solution offerings, expanding its partner ecosystem has been an essential part of the company’s growth.
Accounting & Consulting Partners
The company collaborates with over 50 tax, accounting, and consulting firms, which not only complement its global, local, and industry-specific regulatory expertise but also points the company towards specific commercial opportunities. The company’s wide range of offerings and sophisticated technology align with these firms’ areas of specialization, enabling organizations to strengthen end-to-end delivery capabilities for a diverse array of clients.
Technology Partners
The company’s pre-built integrations with key partners, including Adobe/Magento, Coupa, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, SAP Ariba, Shopify, Workday, and Zuora, among many others, are key differentiators that enables its customers to seamlessly connect the company’s solutions into their business applications and processes. The company’s trusted brand reputation has allowed it to be the leading SAP and Oracle tax technology provider, with a relationship spanning many years with these vendors. The company’s technology software and solutions and highly scalable transaction volume throughput has earned the trust of world-class online marketplaces. These deep partnerships allow the company to expand the frontier of tax technology innovation and market opportunity.
Channel and Resellers
The company continues to expand its indirect go-to-market reach to capitalize on the significant mid-market growth opportunities. These partners include value-added resellers, service providers and original equipment manufacturer relationships with technology firms, system integrators, tax consultants and industry groups, such as Avanade, Acumatica, and CPA.com. These investments enable certification, training, and enablement to deliver rapid time-to-value and scale.
Research and Development
The company’s research and development expenses were $ 66.7 million in 2024.
Acquisitions
During the second quarter of 2024, the company acquired the remaining 20% equity interest of Systax Sistemas Fiscais LTDA (‘Systax’), a provider of Brazilian transaction tax content and software. On June 5, 2024, Systax became a wholly owned subsidiary of the company.
History
Vertex, Inc. was founded in 1978. The company was incorporated in 2020.
