Spinnaker Solves Payroll Tax Issue for JDE World Shops

November 13, 2012 Alex Woodie

The looming end-of-life for critical payroll tax functionality in older releases of JD Edwards World has been addressed with a new software product from Spinnaker Support.

Last week, the Denver, Colorado-based company officially launched Q Series Integrator, a piece of software that acts as a bridge between the Payroll module of JDE World version A7.3 through A9.2 and the Vertex, Payroll Tax Q Series (PTQ), a tax calculation and reporting solution. Vertex has an agreement with Oracle to provide tax functionality for several ERP systems, including JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne and E-Business Suite.

The issue is that Vertex will stop supporting its Payroll Tax L Series (PTL) product in December 2013. This is a problem because the Vertex PTL product was embedded into JDE World versions A7.3 through A9.2. Oracle’s solution is for JDE World shops to upgrade to World A9.3, which features Vertex’s Payroll Tax Q Series (PTQ) product.

Not all organizations running older versions of JDE World want to upgrade to A9.3 just to obtain the PTQ functionality. And for some JDE World shops–such as those who have outsourced their technical support and maintenance functions to Spinnaker–the upgrade is next to impossible (those maintenance reinstatement fees from Oracle certainly won’t look good to the CFO).

Spinnaker’s solution to this, as you may have guessed, is to build an integrator product that lets those older versions of World run with the newer version of the Vertex tax software. That’s exactly what Payroll Tax Q Series (PTQ) does.

“When Spinnaker Support first became aware of the Vertex and Oracle announcements regarding the migration to Q Series, we knew the World user community needed a better option,” said Matt Stava, managing principal of Spinnaker Support. “Because payroll is such a critical function within all organizations, we put our resources to work on creating a solution to extend the life of the older JDE World versions for these customers.”

Making and selling PTQ as a product is a good move for Spinnaker, which is providing third-party technical support and maintenance services to more than 160 JD Edwards customers. Obviously, Spinnaker’s third-party support customers need this solution (since they have cut ties with Oracle and can’t upgrade to A9.3 without incurring death-defying fees).

But even other JD Edwards World customers who are still paying Oracle its 22 percent ransom may not want to, or be able to, upgrade to A9.3 in the next 12 months. From a purely marketing point of view, this is a genius move that will build good repertoire with customers who may become third-party maintenance customers with Spinnaker in the future.

Spinnaker says PTQ is currently in beta, and takes an average of four weeks to implement. For more information, see the company’s website at spinnakersupport.com.