Properly documenting and withholding the right amount of tax from nonresident aliens has become an increasingly important issue for educational institutions.
International students come from a variety of different countries and spend different amounts of time in the US. So how can you manage all of your international students from a tax perspective when no ‘one-size-fits-all’ rule applies?
Sprintax Calculus (formerly Sprintax TDS) is a tool that ensures nonresidents are taxed correctly from their first day working in the US – guaranteeing that the right amount of tax is withheld from their earnings and reported to the IRS.
A cloud-based payroll software, Sprintax Calculus is already working with more than hundreds of educational institutions all over the US.
How does Sprintax Calculus work?
The first point to note is that Sprintax Calculus is completely cloud-based. No software installs are required. As soon as foreign nationals come into the campus, they are assigned an account on Sprintax Calculus.
They answer a simple online questionnaire and, based on their answers, our payroll tool determines their residency status for tax purposes, as well as identifying what treaty benefits they are entitled to and whether they can avail of any deductions.
Sprintax Calculus also enables you to withhold the correct amount of tax from payments made to them.
Finally, our software generates the relevant tax forms for the nonresident – including forms 1042-S, W-4, W-8BEN, 8233. It can also generate the W-8BEN-E series if you are engaging with foreign vendors.
When filling out our questionnaire, students can rely on an experienced Live Chat support team 24/7 who can answer their questions.
When tax filing season comes around, students can transfer their data to the Sprintax tax preparation software. This will enable them to prepare their Federal and State tax return (and form 8843) easily online.
How Sprintax Calculus helps you solve payroll problems
1. It saves time!
It can be complex and time-consuming to determine how to individually tax each one of your international students and scholars.
Sprintax Calculus is a tool specifically designed to help schools withhold and report the correct amount of tax from US payments to nonresident students, scholars and professionals who are being paid scholarships, wages and stipends.
2. It cuts out paperwork
Our software Sprintax Calculus is an innovative, paper-free way to manage all tax-related forms.
Instead of dealing with endless paperwork, Sprintax Calculus allows you to store information securely in the cloud.
The document exchange function allows your nonresidents to store and upload tax-related documents in a secure place that you can access as needed.
3. Tax treaty research is a thing of the past!
Forget spending hours leafing through the IRS website researching tax treaty agreements.
You can easily determine whether your nonresidents are eligible for any tax treaties and deductions with Sprintax Calculus. Our software also confirms whether or not the employee is a resident or nonresident for tax purposes.
4. Forget archaic solutions! Sprintax Calculus is a user-friendly, one-stop shop!
The software highlights the tax status of your international scholars and students on a convenient admin dashboard and defines how they should be taxed on income from your institution.
You can upload multiple users to the system or manually upload students by entering their name and email on the upload wizard. The users will receive a welcome email with a link to their Calculus portal.
You can see in real-time how many students have completed their accounts and view all the activity that is taking place in the system.
Admins will also have reports and access to important payroll information such as tax residency status, country of residence, applicable tax treaties and their status on TDS.
You can also generate your own individual report with the information you prefer. You will be able to choose the columns you wish to see and export the report into a CSV file.
The administrator is able to access the student’s portal and edit the information on their profile, to make sure the information is correct. The system documents who was the last user to make any changes. The admin will also be able to generate a 1042-S form for each selected user.
Admins can access a report of all payments per user, income code, dates, tax rates, tax calculated and all other information that the institution may need to review for each student. To make it even easier, all the information can be exported into Excel.
The dashboard will also give you information about the students who have missing information and you will be able to send them reminders.
5. We remove tax season stress!
Each nonresident’s details can be transferred from Sprintax Calculus into our tax preparation solution. This will enable each user to easily file their tax documents (Federal and State tax returns and form 8843) before the deadline.
Want to learn more about Sprintax Calculus?
To find out more about how Sprintax Calculus can help your payroll office, why not register for a FREE Sprintax TDS demo here.
