We have Pitney Bowes for address validation. Our ...
# generals
scottvonduhn
10/25/2019, 3:53 PMWe have Pitney Bowes for address validation. Our tax engine is ONESOURCE.
c
C_Billings
10/26/2019, 3:51 AMoh God...really?
s
scottvonduhn
10/26/2019, 12:19 PMAre you surprised about PB or TR ONESOURCE? Actually, Pitney Bowes has been okay (not perfect, but very willing to help and fix issues). ONESOURCE however ... if we didn't have a multi-year contract we'd probably be making a change.
c
C_Billings
10/26/2019, 4:20 PMONESOURCE...yes. What are the pain points? I would bet the same as I'm dealing with now
s
scottvonduhn
10/26/2019, 5:57 PMThe biggest issues have been lack of usability: they set up numerous custom rules for us, very few of which were actually necessary, and they have no interface to view the rules or be able to modify them easily. Another issue has been performance and availability. They have had many outages, including a few major ones last month, and they basically don't seem to care. The biggest issue, though, from my perspective is that several tax jurisdictions are simply calculating wrong. For a company that specializes in taxes, that particular issue is not acceptable and not forgivable to me. I would expect the occasional or infrequent issues, but we are seeing entire states and major cities calculating the wrong rate, or simply omitting taxes that need to be collected. Their support is not very good either.
c
C_Billings
10/27/2019, 1:11 AMThats totally different than my experiences...the engine is fine...I suspect there is something more going on with your instance...the integration to NetSuite on the other hand adds more limitations than it should
s
scottvonduhn
10/27/2019, 1:13 PMHmm, well it could be our billing patter. We generate 99% of our bills in a 3 hour period once a month, using 14 simultaneous processors (we have 3 SuiteCloud Plus licenses), so if they are down for even one hour during that window, it affects 1 third of our invoices. That has happened.
Our other issue is, since we are a SaaS company, we really only have use tax to deal with, not sales tax, but in many instances we have seen taxes calculate incorrectly, using the sales tax rate for the address, not the use tax rate, as they are sometimes different.
scottvonduhn
10/27/2019, 1:13 PMI think that ONESOURCE is also not yet using SuiteTax, they have an older custom integration, using a variety of scripts and SuiteGL plugins.
c
C_Billings
10/27/2019, 5:16 PMNot true. I built both integrations.
C_Billings
10/27/2019, 5:16 PMThey were actually first to market with SuiteTax
C_Billings
10/27/2019, 5:17 PMBased on my knowledge I have yet to see the platform down..ever. While I am not a fan of the company I would check into the outage....I'd be very curious of that uptime
C_Billings
10/27/2019, 5:35 PMI'd look int why its not calculating properly for sales tax...I'm working with a 5B company that is SaaS and they arent having your problem. Config is everything with that engine
s
scottvonduhn
10/27/2019, 7:04 PMOkay. It was actually on of their employees that said they were not using SuiteTax and were in the process of building a new integration. It's possible they just didn't know the details.
scottvonduhn
10/27/2019, 7:11 PMOne major issue we have, and it is partly Netsuite Professional Service's fault, is that our Location classification was renamed and repurposed as a type of custom segment prior to us going live by our implementation rep. Because of that, we do have a slightly special setup where taxes are entirely based on the Transaction Ship To address, and Location has to be ignored. We also needed line item taxes, as only some of our services are considered applicable for use tax, and the services taxable vary by state. So, we aren't really sure exactly why we are having trouble. Very likely our unusual setup is part of the problem. The other may be that we generated over 10,000 invoices per hour during our bill run. We could be having concurrency issues with either Netsuite or ONESOURCE, but so far neither company has been able to determine why we have such a request timeout rate for tax calculations.
As for outages, they are definitely happening, and in fact they had a 3 or 4 days period where they had repeated outages (either one or two months ago). Their short term solution was to add more processing power, but they said their long term plan is to move to an elastic cloud-based provider to give them the ability to handle large bursts of increased usage more gracefully.
c
C_Billings
10/28/2019, 2:10 PMhmmm. who implemented the product? They need a talking to...all of these things sound very bad and the product has lots of options. you shouldnt be forced to only send ship to as the system automatically pulls various addresses. Ever read the setup and user guide?
s
scottvonduhn
10/28/2019, 2:41 PMI have not personally read the setup guide. Unfortunately, the person on our end who set up the product passed away suddenly. So my coworkers have had to step in and take over, but with little background. And our support contact has given us some information that doesn't make sense. It may be our misunderstanding, but we have lost a great deal of expertise, and there was no chance to transfer knowledge.
scottvonduhn
10/28/2019, 2:41 PMWe are doing a round of testing with ONESOURCE today, hopefully to iron out some more issues.