Consider the full problem

Hello there!

A few years ago, I made a decision that was meant to increase efficiency and improve my quality of life at work. Because I didn’t fully consider the problem I was trying to solve, the decision ended up making things more complicated.

Some background. 37signals is a remote company which means we have staff all over the world, including all over the United States. The company establishes a business presence & files taxes in each state. We have 27 US employees working from 15 states. So it’s a considerable task to maintain 30+ payroll tax accounts, not to mention fielding the agonizingly tedious state correspondence that accompany them.

I wanted help managing our state accounts. I thought I wanted help with organization. Our tax information was scattered across platforms — in Basecamp, on spreadsheets, and in our payroll software. I was manually tracking deadlines and notices, and I completed those as they came due. I thought, if I could find a solution that managed all of that for me, I could reduce the headache.

Enter tax compliance software and its lofty promises of managing this work better than I ever could. You’ll never miss a filing deadline again! You’ll only receive mail you need to see! New registrations are as simple as clicking a button! So I signed up, ready to unload my burden onto a service whose sole job is to organize all the moving parts of tax compliance for me.

But while organization was an issue, it wasn’t my full problem. I was also seeking peace of mind. Comfort and security in knowing that the process I use works 100% of the time. The compliance product we ended up using “works” in the sense that our information is all in one place. But I’m still regularly checking up, verifying that they’re doing the work with the same diligence I’d put into it, 100% of the time. Adding software has decreased my peace of mind surrounding tax compliance. Had I fully considered my problem, I never would have added the service and instead shored up my existing tracking process in Basecamp.

The lesson I took? Fully consider the problem I’m trying to solve. Then seek the least complex solution that addresses both the surface and deeper aspects of it. My existing tool — Basecamp — used more thoughtfully was all I really needed to solve my problem.

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Some news and thoughts we’ve shared:

Basecamp Office Hours

Join Kimberly and Ashley of 37signals for a LIVE webinar on Wednesday, January 22, at 11:00AM CT. They’ll be joined by a Basecamp customer to walk through how they use Basecamp to manage projects outside of work. Peek inside live accounts to see how Basecamp can manage family life, vacations, hobbies, and more. Bring your questions and get them answered live by a Basecamp expert. Register here!

37signals Dev Blog

Victor of our Ops team wrote an update about our move out of the cloud, how we use Prometheus for metrics, alerts, and monitoring 10 petabytes of data in Pure Storage. Read more!

Talk to you next time!
— Andrea, People Ops at 37signals