Let’s rewind the clock back a few years and recall those ancient days of paper intensive processes. It’s the first day of work and your new employee has just been instructed to head over to the HR Department to complete forms, forms, and more forms. Suddenly, you have the Federal Tax Form, the state tax form, and a plethora of other company specific documents to review, co-sign, and verify. If all of those aren’t enough, the state tax form, in particular, has always been extremely confusing for most employees and often not completed correctly. Unless you had a wise payroll manager, many of your forms probably ended up being out of compliance. For example, your employee might have entered a number of withholding allowances and claimed full exemption. The state tax authority has always considered that option invalid.

Well, let’s jump back into the time machine and return to the 21st century. There are now companies like Emerald Software Group that can completely automate your company’s forms, particularly state tax forms. Did you know that California employees may use the Federal W-4 as the state tax form or choose a number of withholding from the California DE-4? Did you know that the same scenario is true for the state of Wisconsin? I bet many of you reading this article have state tax forms sitting in your filing cabinet that could cost your company hundreds of dollars in fines. Speaking from experience, I’ve learned that many employees will attempt to enter a flat dollar amount, a percentage, or make notes on the tax form that could render it invalid. If your company is still using paper tax forms and it’s not reviewed carefully by an experienced payroll associate, the form could end up costing your company thousands in fines. With an onboarding solution like Emerald Software, the business rules are written into the application which eliminates error. Not only will your state tax forms be paperless, but the data can be integrated to your HRMS solution, and most importantly, there are no mistakes because all of the state’s business rules are written into the application.

To sum it up, you can automate your entire new hire onboarding process with a paperless solution, reduce data entry with an interface to your HRMS and virtually eliminate the possibility of non-compliant forms. So, are you still living in the 70’s with your filing cabinets full of paper and errors galore? Or, have you made a decision to implement an onboarding system? I hope it’s the latter and I hope you have considered Emerald Software Group.