If you have US employees living and working across state lines, it is important that you understand and manage your company’s payroll withholding obligations. This aspect of payroll can be complicated, but it's essential to remain compliant. In earlier posts, we offered a basic guide to payroll withholding for businesses as well as an explanation as to why state-to-state payroll withholding matters now more than ever. In this post, we’ll explore how technology can help your company manage its payroll withholding obligations for cross-border employees more effectively.

Using technology to support payroll activities for multistate workers

In a previous blog post, we outlined the questions that need to be answered when calculating payroll withholding obligations. These were:

• Which employees are working in different states?
• Where exactly are they working?
• Where do they normally work from?
• What business activities are they carrying out?
• How long have they been working in each US state?

Many companies start by managing the data related to each of the questions above for each employee by logging into various siloed systems, manually creating documents, and alternating between emails and spreadsheets. This approach is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error. As your business travel and distributed work programs grow, it makes sense to invest in tools and technologies that can help manage aspects of your payroll withholding obligations. The crucial first step though, is to be able to view location data in a consolidated place.

One core platform to capture location data so you can better manage payroll withholding processes

With the rise of remote work, the return of business travel and the continuing popularity of traditional mobility assignments and relocations, it’s likely that your employees are more widely distributed than ever before. While work location flexibility brings many benefits for talent acquisition and retention, it makes many internal processes, including calculating and managing payroll withholding, more complicated. With an integrated technology platform, you can see where your employees are, whether they are working from home, from the office, on a business trip or on an assignment, giving you complete visibility of your distributed workforce, while respecting your employees’ privacy needs and your organization’s security requirements. 

Of course, to create an effective single source of truth for your employee location data, you need efficient ways of getting this data into the system. We will now look at two such ways -  automated location capture on a specific device and integrations with other providers - in more detail below.

Automated location capture on a specific device

Without technology, many companies spend hours every month manually entering their employees’ locations into calendars to track their whereabouts. This process is not only time-consuming but manual entry can lead to inaccurate data and inefficiencies. However, with the right tools in place, companies can now easily automate the process of capturing location data on specific devices and populating the system - be that via a company laptop, a tablet or a mobile phone. Using technology in this way saves time, reduces admin and ensures accuracy, allowing employees to focus on more strategic tasks that drive business growth and innovation. 

Integrations with other providers

If you don’t want to opt for an approach where you are using location tracking on a specific employee device, technologies like Topia will integrate with a range of other systems such as HR, T&E, travel management agencies and more. This means that a single platform can draw in data from multiple sources creating a consolidated view of employee location. Our solution can use data feeds from key travel providers such as SAP Concur or BCD Travel. And of course, data can be manually added, adjusted or tweaked if preferred.

Find out more about technology to manage payroll withholding

Technology can provide significant benefits for companies looking to manage payroll withholding for employees who are regularly working from different states more effectively. Learn more about Topia’s solutions for state-to-state payroll withholding management here.

Nothing in this article should be considered or construed as tax advice. Topia does not dispense tax advice and always recommends that taxpayers consult their accountants, tax advisers or lawyers.