How are Tax Updates Handled?

Author: Eric Vasbinder

Overview

Tax updates in Vista are a critical part of normal operation that allow customers to keep up to date with tax laws and financial implications of tax rate changes and more.  In the past, when on-premise, customers would download, install, and initialize tax updates themselves.  This is no longer totally true when moving to the cloud as take as much of the burden off of your shoulders as possible.

Downloads and Installs Included

When you move to Trimble Construction One, Trimble Viewpoint now manages the totality of your Vista environment's patching, updates, and more.  This includes the downloading and installation of new tax updates.

Initialization NOT Included

Unlike downloading and installing the tax updates, the act of initializing tax updates is something that we do NOT perform for our customers.  Customers MUST themselves take the final step of initialization of tax updates.  There is a very critical reason for this:  potential impact to ongoing financial activities that may be happening in a previous period that is not yet closed.  For example, let's say that we download and install the tax updates for your environment on 20 December.  If we were to preemptively initialize the tax updates, any submissions, including payroll and more, that were created from 20 December to 31 December would have erroneous updates to tax routines activated.  In another scenario, what would happen in the event that the tax updates were downloaded and installed on 10 January, but your organization had yet to close the books for the previous year and was still working on corrections and data entry?  

Thus, to avoid any potential problems, we do NOT perform the final step of initialization of our new tax routine updates.  This is an action that you, as the customer, will need to perform at such time as you are ready to start actively utilizing those new calculations in your workflows.

Initializing Tax Routines

To initialize the tax routines, you must go into the PR Routines module and initialize them for each PR company in Vista.  The instructions and a screenshot for this are linked here (requires support account):  https://support.viewpoint.com/s/knowledgedetail?c__urlname=181219113732430

For convenience, those instructions are duplicated below:

Steps to Initialize Tax Routines

1.       In PR Routines, select File >Initialize.

2.      At the prompt, click Yes to begin initialization.  When the initialization is complete, the system displays a message notifying you that the tax routine initialization was successful.  You will then see the current date in the Last Updated field in the routine master.

3.      Verify that the system updated the procedure name with the current year for each routine.

NOTE: If multiple updates occur for a routine in the same year, the suffix will include a sequential number after the year (e.g. 176).

NOTE: If using a version prior to 2021 R2, the form is called PR Routine Master

When you run the new tax routines, verify that the changes have been activated and that the calculations are correct.