Xero has added an enhancement to its payroll offering for the top three employer states in the United States: California, Florida and Texas.
Xero already offered their integrated payroll functionality for these states along with New Jersey, New York, Utah and Virginia; however, this new offering expands the capabilities of the Xero Payroll by allowing employers in these states to file their state returns and make state tax payments electronically directly from within Xero.
Payroll for Xero (US) began a little more than a year ago with these 'big three' states at the time, and has since added the other states mentioned (above). Over time the plan is to integrate payroll functionality for every state in the US; however, Colorado, Illinois, Washington, Maryland, Hawaii, Indiana and Ohio are targeted for Xero's next payroll offering.
While Xero's goal is to offer employers within every state payroll capabilities and E-filing functionality at the federal level by the end of 2015, they have not yet announced when they would be supporting all states tax requirements for electronic services as well.
One of Xero's customers responding to the new enhancements was, Steve Chaney, CPA who is Managing Partner for the firm of Chaney & Associates in Roseville, CA. Mr. Chaney said, "Switching to Payroll in Xero from manual payroll processing has already saved me over 45 hours in time a month. The launch of electronic filing and payment will add even further savings as it means that I'll never need to worry about costly state or federal penalties again."
Xero's payroll capabilities are relatively economical when added to their cloud based accounting technology. When their relatively low cost of payroll is coupled with the fact (according to Xero statistics) that 33% of small businesses get fined for doing payroll wrong, Xero advertises that their new capabilities will allow the 1.3 million small business employers in California, Florida and Texas to easily meet their tax obligations without fear of missing key deadlines and incurring costly fines.
Source Information: Xero, Xero Payroll and Marketwired.
If you are interested in reading the official 'press announcement' issued earlier today (January 14, 2015), you can do so at this Marketwired link.