Tips for Managing Your Business’ Payroll

As a small business owner, managing your business’ payroll is a challenge you face constantly. Managing the money of your employees is both challenging, and a big responsibility. Throw in some unfamiliarity with the laws and procedures, tasks related to taxes, withholdings, and deductions, and payroll chews up a lot of your time. However, there are tips and tools that can be employed to make your job a whole lot easier.

Get an EIN

Employee Identification Numbering is a system used by the IRS to identify your company and employees when you file for taxes. This is something that you should do almost immediately after the formation of your company as it is required for your employees, and in some states the business identification number is required as well. If you haven’t yet applied for this system, the process is fairly simple and can be done online through the IRS website.

Image Source: Pixabay

Accurately Track Employee Hours

In many industries workers work a standard number of hours (typically sixty or eighty hours) per pay period. However in other industries hourly workers with non-standard schedules are much more common. In these cases having an accurate picture of the number of hours that each employee has worked is essential. Using a time card system and one of the many software systems that are available on the market is a great way of tracking time. This allows you to calculate not only pay for each hourly employee more accurately, but withholdings and taxes as well.

Consider Using Some Tools

It’s been said that the advantage of the human race over animals is the ability to create and use tools. This is true even for managing Payroll. Cynthia Boris recommends four excellent options for business owners. RUN powered by ADP is a mobile app which costs a small subscription fee which allows you to do a large number of functions, including paying employees and contractors, and calculating taxes and deductions. SurePayroll Mobile Payroll has many of the same features as RUN, and additionally offers an employee companion. There are many other good options, each with different features that make it useful to different business owners and types of business.

Try Using a Payroll Service

Payroll is much more than just cutting checks with tasks like calculating deductions and taxes, and filing W-2’s each year being just a few of the additional tasks. If in the end you decide that managing payroll isn’t your forte, using a payroll service may be the best way to go. There are many payroll services available to the business owner. Fees run in the range of $20 to $100 a month on average depending on the size of the business and which services are used.