The W-4 form, also known as an Employee's Withholding Certificate, is filled out by employees when starting a new job to ensure that the correct amount of income tax is withheld from their paychecks. This form includes information about the employee's filing status, number of dependents, and any additional income.

Every worker in the United States should fill out a federal W-4 form for federal income taxes [1].

The following states also have state-specific W-4 forms. If you have employees that reside in one of these states, then they will need to fill out that state-specific form in addition to the federal form:

All other states have no income tax, and therefore do not have a state-specific W-4 form.

Fountain also supports a number of optional state W-4 forms, such as forms for military spouse withholding exemptions or certificates of nonresidence.

These will be automatically assigned to your workers who reside in that state, but will be labeled as Optional, and are not required to be filed out by workers in order to complete their W-4 task. See the worker portal section below for more details on how this looks to your workers.

Assigning W-4 forms to your employees is done through an onboarding flow task.

Follow these steps to create an onboarding flow that will assign the correct W-4 form(s) to your workers:

From there, add any other tasks that are needed for this flow, and complete the onboarding flow setup as outlined here.

After a flow with a W-4 task has been published, then each worker in that flow will be automatically assigned a W-4 task with a status of Pending.

First, your employee will fill out a W-4 profile form with their name and address. The information entered here will be used to auto-fill the official W-4 form(s).

Note: This W-4 profile page is the same profile page used for I-9 tasks. If an employee has already filled out this profile form for an I-9 task, then they will not need to fill it out again for the W-4 task (and vice versa).

After filling out this profile, employees will be shown a list of assigned W-4 forms to fill out. This includes a required state W-4 form, if applicable, and any optional state forms. Optional forms will be clearly marked as "(Optional)":

Tapping on anyof the forms will open a mobile-friendly, easy to fill out version of the federal or state form, including pre-filled information from the W-4 profile form previously filled out:

Employees will be guided through their forms to fill out information for:

Filing Status (required)

Exempt Status (optional)

Multiple Jobs or Spouse Works (optional)

Claiming dependents (optional)

Other adjustments (other income, deductions, and extra withholding) (optional)

This includes a helpful deductions worksheet for employees to utilize:

After all fields have been filled out, the employee will electronically sign the document to confirm that all information is correct, and then submit it:

Completed forms will have a green checkmark next to them in the Assigned Forms list, so employees can quickly see which forms still need to be filled out:

Tapping or clicking on the completed form will show the status of the form, along with an option to view/download the form itself:

Once an employee fills out all required W-4 forms, they will have the option to indicate that they've filled out all forms that are relevant to them by clicking this "I've Completed All Applicable Forms" button. This will mark the W-4 task as complete:

To keep track of the statuess of all of your employee's W-4 forms, access the W-4 Forms table by going to:

By default, you'll see W-4 forms in all statuses:

Filter to specific statuses by using the Status tabs at the top of the table, or the Filters button in the top right. Available statuses are:

Click the Filters button in the top right to filter based on W-4 status, case tags (see below), or worker attributes.

By default, the W-4 forms table includes columns for worker's email address, first name, last name, start date, and W-4 status.

You can add or remove additional columns, such as case tags on the worker's profile and additional worker fields/attributes by clicking on the Columns button in the top right.

From there, select the checkbox for columns that you would like to display on the table, and unselect the checkboxes for any columns that you want hidden, then click Apply. These settings will apply on to you (not to any other colleagues!):

To take action on a W-4 form for an employee, or view more information about it, click the Manage button. This will open the worker's W-4 profile:

The W-4 profile will show you the submitted W-4 form, which you can review, download, & print. If the employee has more than one form assigned to them, you can see how many submissions are in the current status at the top of the profile:

Additional actions that can be taken depend on the status that the form is in, but include:

Depending on the setup of your user permissions, you may see the option to add tags to each worker's W-4 profile:

These are free-text values that are created by someone in your company in the tag manager activity. Tags are meant to help communicate quick facts about the worker and the I-9 form to others in your company. For example, your company use tags to indicate if a W-4 was manually approved.

Other things to know about tags:

Once tags are added to workers, you can apply filters to see workers with or without that specific tag on the W-4 Forms table:

The Notes section of a worker's W-4 profile allows you to leave a free-text note directly in the profile. This can be useful to keep track of any actions you've taken with this employee, such as reaching out to them about an incomplete W-4 form:

After adding a note, you can edit or delete it by clicking the more actions button:

[1] IRS overview of the W-4 form

↪️ I-9 Section 1 workflow

↪️ Onboarding flows

↪️ Getting started with onboarding