Does multi-state payroll have to be so hard?

I have a problem. I thought I could fix it, but I can’t. 

Or maybe I can, but I haven’t yet.

A little over a year ago, we launched 🚖 Tax E Driver, a employer state tax ID registration service that doesn’t suck.

The idea was to take everything that people hate about services like CorpNet and make it a pleasant, supportive experience for people. 

We’d answer their questions in words that made sense. 

We'd support them as they entered their tax IDs into their payroll system.

If they got alerts from payroll or letters in the mail, we’d translate them into action.

All for an affordable price.

That last part was the problem.

Initially, I’d planned to staff the service with experienced people that I trusted. But right after launch, life threw me an unpleasant surprise and I wound up having to fulfill it myself.

I saved some people from some 🐂💩, but it took much, much longer than expected.

Even if I had a detailed map every state’s process and idiosyncrasies, there would still be 🐂💩.

And without access to customers' payroll records, I often had to ask the same person to help who was paying me to take it off their hands.

🧌 In a midwestern state, I ran into a troll on a power trip.

💸 In a southwestern state, I ran into a $200 Secretary of State fee that I hadn't anticipated.

👈 👉 In a northeastern state, I found out that they no longer used a combined application for unemployment. 

📞 “Have they still not updated the instructions on the website?” the phone-lady asked. “They made the change in 2020.”

Meanwhile, I had a few payroll clients who needed state registrations as part of their projects.

With payroll access, I could knock out a registration soup to nuts in under 30 minutes.

Less than 15 if it was a combined application.

Some of the more tech-forward payroll providers have AI doing the process. It’s trained to map their intake form click-by-click into the online registration site.

But it’s only as good as the data you put into the form.

And, robots or not, Doug in Minnesota can always ruin someone’s day.

So, what’s my point?

I don’t know. Maybe that managing multi-state taxes will never be easy because the states make it that way.

If you surrender to the idea that you can’t simplify it, it’s not so bad.

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Or maybe the idea is that you shouldn’t just hire 🚖 Tax E Driver to do the registration, you should hire Back Office MVP to manage all of your payroll compliance. That would be a good lesson to take from this.

I'll take you up on that!