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For those with a history of working from home, the T2200 Tax Form is likely one that has become common practice to fill out. For those new to a work from the home arrangement (as a result of COVID-19, for instance), this form is known as the Declaration of Conditions of Employment. It is an employer declaration that is required for employees that work from home to claim employment-related expenses.
Unsurprisingly, most companies have not thought twice about filling out this form until recently, but the widespread transition to working remotely due to the ongoing pandemic has increased awareness of a potential tax break for both employers and employees and the additional workload for your services procurement team. According to Statistics Canada, the number of workers working from home has nearly tripled from 1.6 million before COVID-19 to 4.7 million as of July 2020.
It is likely that more of your employees than ever before will be able to deduct expenses for the employment use of a workspace in the home if one of two conditions are met:
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Your workforce is spending more than 50% of the time using a home office as their primary workspace.
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Their home space is used to earn income. Your team is meeting clients, customers, or conducting any other work-related meetings in or from their home
As an employer with an expanded remote workforce, why is this important to me?
It is the responsibility of the employer to certify that an employee is required to work from home and provide a T2200 form to the employee. Because this must be done on an individual employee basis, employers may face a significant increase in administrative burdens this tax season.
Making the Form Filling Process Simpler
The T2200 includes the employee’s name, address, social insurance number, and 13 additional questions. Including, “did this employee’s contract require them to pay their own expenses while carrying out the duties of employment?” Answering no to this question will omit the employee from being able to deduct any expenses. Many of these questions are quite specific and only pertain to certain roles within your company. Therefore, completing forms manually may require extended efforts from your HR team.
The Tax Forms Manager from ConvergentIS seeks to significantly reduce the time that employers and managers invest in preparing tax forms s each tax season. By streamlining and guiding the process of generating the required tax forms, there is an elimination of human errors, including data input errors and missing fields. The application automates as much of the process as possible, most recently in the T2200 employer declaration.
Within the T2200 tool, questions can be prefilled by your company to streamline the entry process so that only relevant questions are presented to the end-user. One example of this is using the T2200 tool to automatically retrieve employee HR details and restricting the data entry to focus on the questions that are relevant to your organization. Fields that are not applicable to your company can be omitted.
The time required to prepare the T2200 forms for employees is significantly reduced by allowing managers to identify employees with common characteristics and complete the required data entry in a single pass rather than preparing a form for each employee individually.
Getting the T2200 Tax Form Tool Up and Running
Like our other apps, the Tax Forms Manager application can be accessed as a tile on your Fiori launchpad and can be installed virtually. Our team has carefully designed each application so that your basis team knows exactly how to deploy them. For more information on the installation process for ConvergentIS apps, we encourage you to check out the video linked.
The Tax Forms Manager works seamlessly with the Convergent Employee Self-Serve (ESS) My Tax Forms, to ensure that employees can directly access their T2200 form when preparing their taxes.
Our Approach to SAP Applications
When creating our SAP Fiori applications, the ConvergentIS team works closely with those in the industry to ensure that the solution makes sense to the end-users. This is done through the process of design thinking, in which user research is conducted. Understanding how people really work allows our team to transform the unnecessarily complex into simple solutions. The result is improved data assurance, process governance, and business velocity for those in any industry. We continue to use this same methodology in all our co-innovations, proudly supporting the SAP AppHaus Network as a partner.
The ConvergentIS team can help you install this app and have it up and running in a matter of hours. To learn how, we encourage you to reach out to our sales team.