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. While TaxAssist uses the standard city, state, and 5-digit zip* to identify a customer’s location, that isn’t always easy enough as zip codes are sometimes span multiple counties. In these situations, without the county identifier, the user must manually select from the available Geocode available. However, if you know the County of the customer, you can enter that into Address 3 of the Customer Card. By doing that, TaxAssist will pass the County to Vertex to more accurately locate the Geocode. This should help minimize the number of unvalidated Geocodes in the system.
* Currently, Vertex currently supports 5-digit zip codes. However, with the release of the 4.0 Q Series in late 2009, Vertex will support 9-digit zip codes which will make it easier to identify the correct Geocode without the use of the County Identifier.
Posted in TaxAssist
[...] Sowers points out that in addition to supporting zip codes for tax jurisdiction identification, Tax Assist for Dynamics GP also supports and optional county code to fine tune the specific taxing authority. This comes in handing when zip codes span counties. [...]