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The new Sales Tax Q Series (STQ) 4.0 release is scheduled to begin availability during the May/June time frame. This release offers new functionality improvements to enhance jurisdiction identification and additional GeoCodes are now available.  The integration builds, such as TransLink, SoftLink, and PL/SQL, will become available after the core builds are completed.  The STQ 4.0 release will be Generally Available (GA), which means it will only be supplied upon request.  Improvements available in the new 4.0 release include the following:

•  New functionality to support both 5-digit and 9-digit ZIP Code lookups to retrieve GeoCodes during either pre-assignment or the calculation process.   
•  New data file with nearly 1,100 additional district level GeoCodes to support this release.  
•  No API functionality changes will be required if you choose to continue to use only the 5-digit ZIP Code look-up, .  
•  No API functionality changes will be required when using the STQ Lookup Utility or the Vertex supplied integrations for SAP (Translink), PeopleSoft (Softlink), or Oracle (PL/SQL).
• Changes will be required to your API integration functions if you choose to use the new 9-digit ZIP Code functionality look-ups in a home-grown or other third-party environment.  See the Jurisdictional Identification Technical Guide found on the Vertex Customer Café for more details.  
•  All prior release improvements included

This new STQ 4.0 release is available to all STQ customers upon request.   In addition, the 3.3 and 3.4 releases are also available.  Please see the Summary Change Notice on the Vertex Customer Café for further information regarding the improvements for each of these releases.   

Starting January 2011, STQ customers who continue to operate on a software release that is five years old or older (that is, STQ release 3.2 or older) will be required to participate in the Extended Support Program in order to continue to receive monthly data updates.  Monthly data update #340, which will be delivered in December 2010, will be the last data update that will be compatible with ALL (old and new) releases of STQ.  

If you cannot upgrade before January 2011, participation in the Extended Support Program will provide continued availability of monthly data updates for older Sales Tax Q Series releases. The price of the Extended Support Program will be an additional 25% of the annual basic renewal fee.  

Vertex recommend that customers continue to visit the Vertex Customer Café^® under Sales Tax > Vertex Sales Tax Q Series > News > The Extended Support Program for the latest information and updates regarding this new program.  If you would like more information regarding the latest available software release(s), please continue to visit the Customer Café.  You may also order the latest program release by submitting a request on the Customer Café at http://www.vertexinc.com/customercafe/onlineform.asp?req=stq40 or by contacting Product Support at 1-800-281-1900 and enter product code 4720.

Vertex Sales Tax Q Series – Issue notification – Texas Sale & Use Tax transactions for the 8/21/09 – 8/23/09 Clothing and School Supply Tax Holiday
August 17, 2009
Dear Vertex Sales Tax Q Series Customer:
An issue has been uncovered in the “C” version of Vertex Sales Tax Q Series 3.3 & 3.4 that can cause over taxation for transactions that are equal to or greater than $100.00 if you are using a Tax Decision Maker (TDM) Rate Override record to handle the Texas Clothing and School Supply Tax Holiday currently scheduled to be in effect August 21 through August 23, 2009. The PL/SQL versions are not affected.

A recent issue has been discovered with TaxAssist running on SQL 2008. The TA_XP.SQL and AddUsers.sql SQL scripts do not function properly on SQL 2008 when trying to add DYNGRP user/database role to “master” and “vertex” databases.

Error:
Could not find stored procedure “sp_addgroup”
Scenario:
Trying to execute TA_XP.SQL or AddUsers.SQL in SQL 2008
Reason:
In SQL 2008, DYNGRP should be added as a Database Role and the existing scripts doesn’t have that logic for it.
Workaround:
Manually add the SQL Database role “DYNGRP” to the master and Vertex database in SQL 2008 before executing the AddUsers.sql or the TA_XP.sql Continue reading »

One of the challenges with any taxing product, is to correctly identify the specific location of an entity such as a customer, warehouse, etc..  This is because to correctly access the tax, you have to know the tax jurisdiction where you are shipping from or shipping to.  Identifying the warehouse or company code for shipping purposes is easy because you know that information already.  However, it is much harder to identify the specific location of a customer.  Continue reading »

With the increasing availability and demand for 64-bit servers, many customers have switched to 64-bit SQL server environments.  While both Microsoft Dynamics GP and Vertex Q Series are not truly 64-bit compatible, they will run on 64-bit SQL servers.  However, TaxAssist will not due to architectural dependencies on these products.  With no timelines in place for true 64-bit versions of these products, it is unknown when a 64-bit version of TaxAssist will be available.  While this appears to be a problem, there is a workaround for those customers running Dynamics GP and Vertex on 64-bit SQL servers.  The solution is to have a separate 32-bit SQL Server configured and allow TaxAssist to run on that server.  With a few simple setup changes, TaxAssist can run normally. Continue reading »