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PaYroLL ResoLutiONs |
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Michael Alter Whether you process payroll manually or use a service, the time is
right to re-evaluate your payroll processes, for outsourcing options
available to small businesses are better than ever.
The end of the year is the best time to sign up with a new payroll service. That way you and your new service provider start the new year with a clean slate. There’s no payroll history to transfer over to the new provider. An estimated 60 to 70 percent of the small businesses that decide to outsource payroll each year do so effective Jan. 1. Certainly you can change providers after the new year starts, but it requires more paperwork. If you’re like most small business owners, paperwork is what you’re wanting to avoid. Remember when you first started? Everything was about growing your business. Over time, though, you got bogged down with tedious, time-consuming administrivia. The worst culprit? Payroll. For starters, you’ve got to keep track of payroll regulations and changes in withholding tables, a time-consuming task. Calculating the actual payroll amounts and deductions is equally tedious. It’s very easy to make a mistake. Then there’s the chore of writing checks and making all the proper quarterly and end-of-year filings for federal, state and local payroll taxes. It’s not ncommon for small businesses to spend two to three hours processing each payroll if they do it manually. Mistakes are costly. Employee morale dips when you give an employee a check or a W2 with errors. They quickly lose faith in management, and while they may forgive, they don’t forget. The Internal Revenue Service never forgets and is far less forgiving. File late or with an incorrect amount and you’ll have to pay a penalty. Every year, four out of 10 small businesses pay an average fine of $845 for payroll errors, cumulatively totaling in the billions. Plus, there are new fines on the horizon if you don’t keep good payroll records. California recently passed a law that imposes a $750 fine on small businesses that aren’t able to quickly produce accurate payroll records upon an employee’s request. Experts are predicting that other states will follow with similar legislation. It simply doesn’t make sense to waste time, money and resources
on a tedious task that is ancillary to your core business. Even if you’ve
already outsourced payroll, there may be room for improvement.
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