You're Going to Run Payroll Anyway, You Might as Well Enjoy It

I’m going to start with something you absolutely already know: payroll is the most important expense for any business. I’m sure you and your team absolutely adore your work, but I somehow doubt they would do it for free. I somehow doubt you’d do it for free, in fact.

Nearly every company has payroll and, by extension, its complexities. Historically, there’s been a patchwork of solutions to get that information into QuickBooks quickly and accurately – maybe you had a payroll company that exported details that you had to review and journalize and match to the bank. Maybe the benefit invoices would come in separately, and you’d have to tie those back to the payroll reports you’d generated from your payroll provider weeks before. That’s a lot of moving parts.

QuickBooks Online Payroll helps you do two things – move faster and stay in compliance. So, let’s pretend for a second that you have a business. A great business that everybody loves. The kind of business where people are always saying “hey, did you hear about this great business?” to their friends. It’s your dream business and you opened it to do that business, not to hand-write checks and try to navigate federal, state, and local payroll tax forms.

Salary and wage management has always been time-consuming and error prone. Yes, even at your pretend business. And if there’s one time you don’t want to misplace a decimal, it’s when you’re running those paychecks. Your business’s team is great, but I’m not sure they deserve $150,000 if you meant $1,500.00.

For most businesses, payroll is different every time. Maybe some changes to employees, or their pay rates, or their hours worked. Just knowing that February payroll is different than March payroll isn’t useful, it isn’t actionable. QuickBooks Online’s anomaly detection means when something doesn’t look right or isn’t what you normally do, the software can tell you. Think of it like having someone standing directly over your shoulder double-checking the math on everything you do … just without the part where someone is annoyingly standing directly over your shoulder. So, your almost-catastrophic typo doesn’t inadvertently give someone that one hundred and fifty times raise.

Compliance is a minefield. Maybe you have an employee who neglects to update their home address in your external payroll system, creating a liability you didn’t realize you had until the State Auditor comes knocking. You knew they moved, and they knew they moved. And now, the State Auditor knows they moved. If they had been using QuickBooks timesheets and projects, it would have been an easy step to change their home state and start filing any required forms, automatically. And that auditor could have stayed home.

And what about “actual cost”? It would be terrific if employee costs were their salary divided by twelve, but there’s a little more to it than that. Maybe you have a spreadsheet, or a notebook, or a dry-erase board, or some wild combination of all three, where you’re piecing together costs for the human component of every job you do. QuickBooks Online’s project module helps you calculate the cost rate of any employee – that is, their salary or wage, benefits, insurance, and taxes. Plus, since it is integrated directly into your books already, when you change employee pay rates, the estimations are automatically updated.

Those costs aren’t just useful externally either; when it comes time for you to give those employees (or yourself) a raise or a bonus, you need to be able to model out what your generosity is going to cost in the long run. Who knows? Maybe you can afford to be more generous than you’d thought.

Finally – I know you aren’t perfect. I’m not either. Ah, to be the person my grandmother always told her friends I was. So, let’s say you made a mistake in payment one week. Transposed a digit or missed a late timesheet or forgot a promised raise. Depending on your payroll provider, this can be a capital-O Ordeal. But Hypothetical You and your world-class business that everyone adores uses QuickBooks Online Payroll, and they offer paycheck corrections for current and past (that is, closed) quarters. They’ll even file the amendment. All you have to do is admit to your grandma that you goofed up. She’ll forgive you, I promise. Mine always did.

It’s an old adage but it’s true: fewer moving parts means fewer broken pieces. Using QuickBooks Online Payroll means you aren’t chasing down details from a payroll processor when it’s time to report that information in your books. Payroll and payroll tax transactions match the bank feed automatically, giving you less manual work to complete. Every paycheck posts directly and automatically to your general ledger. Plus, you know every line from salary, to tax, to benefits, will be in the right place for your reporting.

So maybe our example company doesn’t exist, yet. Maybe you’re the only employee at your business, for now. There’s no business too small for accurate payroll. You and your (future?) team will deserve to be paid fairly and on-time. And once you start this Very Popular Example Company, you will be too busy shaking hands, kissing babies, and being awarded the key to the city to worry about amending borough-level tax withholding returns. Let QuickBooks handle the boring stuff while you work on the fun part.