Release date: 9/30/2021

Version: 8.5 and Up

The Vertex option will calculate the tax rates for each customer and ship-to record in Elliott.  This is achieved by assigning a Geo Code to each record and the Geo Code is used to find the appropriate rates in the Vertex Rate Table.  Rates and Geo Codes are updated on a monthly basis from Vertex.  Utilities are provided to import that data into Elliott and tax rates are calculated with that data. Elliott has two utilities to generate the Geo Codes, one for the AR Customer file and one for the COP Ship-To file. The previous utilities only used the state and zip code to generate the Geo Code and the report provided little information.

Unless you knew to investigate incomplete Geo Codes, some records may be left with invalid Geo Codes, and a Geo Code of zeros would make the tax rates zero.

The new report gives a lot more information, including: the city, state, and zip code in the record; the city and state of the Elliott zip code lookup; the old Geo Code; the new Geo Code; and the status of the Geo Code generation.

We improved the utilities to use several methods to generate a valid Geo Code.  If the state and zip code produce a valid Geo Code and the new code is different from the one in Elliott, the record is printed with a status of ERROR.  Vertex uses the state for the calculation when a 5-digit zip code is provided.  When a 10-digit (5 plus 4) zip code is provided, the state is ignored.  For this reason, we also provide the city and state from the Elliott Zip Codes file using the base 5-digit zip code.  The Elliott data has no bearing on the calculation, but is provided as a reference.  That way you can make sure the city and state in the record are consistent with the ones found in the Elliott Zip Codes file.  If the zip code does not have a record in the Elliott Zip Codes file, the Zip Lookup City will be printed as "*** NOT FOUND ***".

If Vertex returns an invalid Geo Code for a 10-digit zip code, the utility will remove the zip extension and try with the base 5-digit zip code.  Even if the base zip returns a valid Geo Code, the record preserves the full 10-digit zip for reference.  The status is given as "Update: Zip extension ignored."  In these cases, you should review the record to make sure the full zip code is correct.

If Vertex returns an invalid Geo Code for a 5-digit zip code, the utility will use just the state.  This will return a partial Geo Code with the county and city as zero, but the result will be closer than all zeros.  The status is given as an error so you can easily identify the problem record.

If a record does not have a city, state, and zip code, the warehouse location is used as the Geo Code.  It is assumed that customers without an address are point-of-sale customers and the selling location should be used for the tax calculation.

Records that are updated will have the new Geo Code saved.  Running the report again should have those records removed from the report since the calculated Geo Code should now match the one that was saved.  That way you can run the report again to see just the errors.  Because of this, we now make the report mode the same as a post, requiring you to either print to a printer or spool the report to disk.