Let’s admit it – payroll is complicated. Payroll processing is a challenging, tedious, and time-consuming task. If you handle payroll in-house, your employees might unintentionally make costly errors that could have long-lasting repercussions for your business. Moreover, they may struggle to stay focused on their core tasks.
Instead of attempting to handle payroll internally, consider outsourcing it to a payroll processing company. Your outsourcing partner will manage your payroll. The provider’s team will take care of all payroll processing tasks such as gathering essential employee tax details, computing net pay, and ensuring timely payments to your employees, so your employees have enough time to fulfill their core responsibilities.
Outsourcing can also eliminate the need for an in-house team, helping you avoid the expenses associated with hiring payroll specialists. Outsourcing payroll is a great way to ensure you never miss an important deadline again.
Here are some signs it’s time to outsource payroll.
Your Employees Make Payroll Errors Frequently
Common payroll mistakes, such as misclassifying employees, failure to maintain proper records, inaccurate tax and salary calculations, and sending out incorrect W-2s, can cause significant financial losses to your business and may haunt your company for years. A payroll specialist is less likely to make these and other payroll mistakes. Professionals follow payroll best practices. They pay attention to every detail and can identify errors that amateurs often miss.
You Do Not Have Enough Time or Resources to Maintain Your Payroll Software
If you use payroll software, you will want to keep it up to date or your team may end up using outdated tax tables. Also, your software may get updates containing new features, bug fixes, and enhancements at regular intervals. Managing and keeping track of software updates can be time-consuming and may involve additional expenses. When you opt for a payroll service near you in Santa Rosa, your provider updates the software with no action needed on your end.
Your Team Isn’t Competent Enough to Meet Compliance Requirements
If you decide to manage payroll yourself, ensuring compliance with complicated federal and state wage and hour laws can be an insurmountable challenge. When you manage payroll, you need to keep on top of regulations regarding pay frequency, minimum wage and overtime requirements, payment methods, payroll taxes, paystubs, and recordkeeping, which can prove to be a headache. Any slip-ups could lead to compliance issues which can attract hefty penalties.
When you utilize a payroll processing service, the provider ensures regulatory compliance and accurate payroll processing and educates your team on legal requirements. Payroll specialists are experts in compliance matters. When you have a payroll processing expert on your side, you need not dedicate time and effort to constantly monitor and stay updated on all the regulations yourself.
Payroll Responsibilities are Detracting Your Employees From Their Primary Duties
Often the individual in charge of managing payroll invests a significant amount of time in the process and may be unable to make time for their core tasks that generate revenue. One of the many benefits of outsourcing payroll is that the provider’s team handles all the daily, weekly, and monthly responsibilities associated with paying employees and ensuring tax compliance. This allows you and your team to concentrate on essential business activities.
Staffing Costs are Increasing
Companies that are constantly growing their workforce find it challenging to manage increased payroll responsibilities. For such businesses, outsourcing payroll can be an ideal solution. Outsourcing payroll is a more cost-efficient approach to handle additional payroll responsibilities than growing an in-house payroll team.
The expenses related to in-house payroll operations extend beyond just the salaries of the staff. Indirect costs, including the cost of payroll software, rental expenses, equipment cost, and employee training cost, must also be taken into account. Outsourcing payroll is a great way to eliminate or reduce these costs.
You Worry Payroll Mistakes May Affect Employee Satisfaction
If you decide to manage payroll in-house, your payroll processing team can make mistakes that can breed employee dissatisfaction.
By outsourcing payroll, you can ensure that your employees are paid accurately and on time. Many payroll providers have a self-service portal that their clients’ employees can access at any time to view their pay details, download pay stubs and W-2s, and update personal information. These features can empower and engage employees, potentially boosting their loyalty to the company.
Your Current System is Inefficient and Causing a lot of Problems
If you are using an outdated and inefficient payroll software, you should seriously consider outsourcing payroll. An outdated system can not only lead to wasted hours and inefficiencies, but it may also fail to handle the complexities of modern work environments.
Payroll and minimum wage laws are ever evolving. A dated payroll software may fail to cope with changes. There is also the worrisome possibility that your system is leaving you vulnerable to legal liabilities. The GDPR law mandates that every organization implements measures to secure its data. By relying on an older software system that lacks modern security features or inefficient manual processes, you inadvertently increase the risk of a data breach.
Outsourcing payroll is a great way to dramatically reduce this risk. Before you outsource payroll, ask the provider about the steps they take to protect customer data.
A payroll processing company can also manage all your reporting needs. Your provider’s team can handle tax notices and submit payroll on your behalf and may also be able to make payments to employees on your behalf, helping lift the burden of managing payroll off your overworked finance team.
Whether you want to build a new payroll service system from scratch or streamline an existing one, Virtual Jeannie Bookkeeping Services Inc. can help. Our payroll specialists in Santa Rosa have mastered different payroll methods. To consult one of them, call 707-664-1425.