Product Development – Kenton County Payroll Imports

Client Overview

Kenton County is the third largest County in Kentucky. Along with being one of the largest counties, its also incredibly unique. Businesses that are located or operate within Kenton County pay their quarterly and annual taxes to the county, which then distributes the correct apportionments to the cities.

Challenge

The primary function of quarterly tax filings are to pay for payroll tax. For years, Kenton has had a system that enabled businesses and payroll companies to file and make their payments online.

While this solution existed, it missed the mark a bit. Most payroll companies are filing on behalf of dozens if not hundreds of businesses, so going through the entire process for filing for each individual client was a hassle, and often times too much of a burden. These companies resorted to paper filings, which was time consuming and expensive for Kenton County to process.

Solution

We set out to create a better way for payroll companies to file on behalf of several clients at once. To do this, we started by interviewing several providers as well as their clients to figure out exactly how they worked. We also reached out to some other counties that operate like this, and got some insight as to how they work.

We moved forward with building a web application specifically for payroll companies. Kenton County personnel can go into their internal system to grant access to a payroll company, which allows them full self-service for filing.

These payroll companies can then get into the portal to upload an XML file containing the filing data for each of their clients, generated by their own system. The system quickly picks this file up, and checks it for major errors or issues. Assuming all is good, the system then allows the payroll company to complete the filing, and even submit payment.

These files can be large, up to several GBs each. To make this as efficient as possible, our system uses Azure Functions to scale for each client being filed for. By fanning out the processing of these files, we take what would normally take several hours for execution, and turn it into a few minutes. Payroll companies can wait for the system to process it while receiving visual updates of progress, or they can simply leave the system and wait to receive the email that their file is processed.

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