At Middesk, our mission is to help businesses access the products and services they need to grow and thrive. We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to simplify legacy processes.
The past 2 years have ushered in a new era of distributed work — and the challenges that come with it. Remote employers have discovered that required processes like registering for payroll taxes are long and painful, with each state providing different hurdles. Employers struggle to complete the process on-time and correctly, and most are only one missed envelope away from falling out of compliance.
We realized we could empower businesses by making it easier for them to build and manage their relationships with government agencies.
In March, we took our first step by launching our Agent product for employers. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses form new tax relationships with state agencies to pay their employees on-time.
Today, we’re announcing the next step in our journey: Tax for platforms.
What Remote Hiring Means for Payroll Platforms
Remote hiring poses both a challenge and an opportunity for payroll platforms.
Remote hiring poses a looming operational challenge for payroll platforms
When employers are late to register, payroll platforms pay through increased overhead. Until now, the only support available to most employers were pages of FAQs. As employers struggled through this process, platforms were forced to navigate customer noncompliance with tax agencies — a problem poised to explode over the next five years as the number of remote workers becomes nearly double what it was before the pandemic [1].
Remote hiring provides an opportunity to win the future of payroll
Payroll is one of fintech’s fastest growing battlegrounds. Hundreds of platforms already offer payroll, and we expect this number to exponentially increase with companies like Gusto, Check, and Puzzl launching payroll-as-a-service APIs. The platforms of tomorrow will win on user experience, and simplifying multi-state compliance would provide a much needed competitive differentiator.
How Middesk Tax Simplifies Remote Hiring
Middesk Tax allows platforms to provide one-click support for a legacy process. Tax is a compliance-as-a-service API that lets platforms embed tax registration services into their product. With a single integration, platforms can allow their customers to set up payroll tax accounts, register with the Secretary of State, and manage government communications.
Tax turns a frustrating user experience that historically took hours into minutes. This allows payroll platforms to own the remote work future in two ways.
First, platforms will be able to scale their operations by getting accurate tax account information on-time and reducing their administrative burden.
Second, a one-click registration process provides a much needed competitive differentiator. Tax allows platforms to elevate the customer experience and frees them to focus on building products that customers love.
Middesk Tax allows payroll platforms to embed tax registration services into their product, streamlining a workflow that used to take hours into minutes.
What’s Next
We’re excited to continue building on this foundation over the coming months, building out a full compliance-as-a-service product suite to help businesses manage their relationships with the government. We’re just getting started to bring “compliance peace of mind” to employers across the country — and we’ll keep partnering with innovative platforms to turn this vision into reality.
Learn More
If you’re a modern platform building the future of payroll — we’re ready to partner with you.
Contact us here.
