How Technology Can Make or Break Your Next Deal

By PrismHR

If a large, profitable client opportunity comes along tomorrow, but they need a service provider who could process payroll for a lot of employees that live and work in different areas, would you be the right HR service provider for them?

The clients you can bring on are limited by your capabilities as an organization. Increasingly, your capabilities as an organization can be tied to the sophistication of your HR service provider software.

Adding Efficiencies: Why it Matters

To start with, many HR service providers do not have the technology to easily calculate taxes for employees who live and work in different locations. Therefore, many do not offer this service at all, and for good reason: Without the benefit of an automated solution, it can be really challenging to do this right. This is because:

  • Different taxes apply if you live and work in different states, or if you work in multiple states.
  • Some states have reciprocity rules specifically governing how much someone owes if they live in one state and work in another. These rules are often exceedingly complicated.
  • Some cities (e.g. San Francisco) have special taxes of their own.
  • If an employee moves during a pay period, the rules governing the taxes they owe may or may not change.
  • Payroll laws tend to shift. Across all state and local jurisdictions, small tweaks to these laws appear with some regularity. Ultimately, this affects your business.

With that in mind, whether you, as an HR service provider, can help a client who deals with these challenges depends on whether you have the technology in place to handle location-based tax accounting. The correct software makes this task easy to manage and enables you to provide an additional service for your clients.

Other forms of automation can also make your business more efficient. For example, worksite employees who need to pay child support (potentially to multiple people) can drain a lot of hours from your HR personnel if there isn’t an easy way to add automatic deductions. Automation can turn a problem client into just another client.

Scalability and Large Clients

If you want to support larger clients, you will need to be able to support a larger workforce. This, in turn, means your HR technology needs to be scalable and efficient to support larger clients and make servicing them as easy as possible. With cloud-based HR software you don’t have to worry about scaling your own IT resources to manage large clients, the software grows with you.

Is Your Technology Ready for Your Next Opportunity?

Like many industries, human resource functions are becoming more intertwined with technology. The services that HR service providers offer now heavily rely and often times are determined by the type of software they’re using. Do you have the tools you need to efficiently and profitably tackle the challenges ahead of you?