Payroll Services

By Dylan Mazeika

For many small businesses, payroll services offer an attractive and valuable alternative to in-house processing. They can provide a less expensive, simpler means of paying employees, filing taxes, and performing other essential tasks.

Is a payroll service right for your small business?

Even for small businesses, processing paychecks internally is not always as cost-effective as it appears. It costs valuable hours of employee time every pay period plus expensive accounting software and training. Also, the person who handles your payroll needs to keep up to date on changes in deadlines, personnel, and tax requirements. They must know payroll procedure and have access to a sound payroll program. In addition, this person cannot be 'sick' or on vacation during pay periods which can be near to impossible.

Payroll outsourcing can be a very affordable way to minimize this burden. If you have significant turnover, or your employees work varying amounts of hours each week, a small business payroll service can be a cost effective and time saving alternative to internal processing. Utilizing a small business payroll service can also be helpful if you have to pay payroll taxes for multiple states.

Even if your payroll expenses are sound, companies with more than 10 employees may find that the time saved by outsourcing payroll easily makes up for the low costs.

Services

Small business payroll services are typically responsible for a range of payroll tasks, including printing and delivering checks, calculating tax obligations and paychecks for each employee, and providing management reports. Paychecks may be delivered on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, semi-monthly or yearly basis.

Additional payroll-related services that may carry separate fees include handling of W2s and automatic check signatures. Many services now offer tie-ins with 401(k) and Section 125 mutual fund plans, allowing employees to schedule automatic deductions from their paychecks.

Additionally, many small business payroll services offer the option of filing state and federal payroll taxes for your business.

How it works

Each pay period, payroll data has to be "called in" to the payroll service provider. Almost all data is now transferred electronically.

The provider will supply software for tracking each employee's pay rate, deductions, and vacation time. You simply enter the relevant information for that pay period, and information is automatically transferred to the payroll service provider.

Some providers also offer Web-based payroll data entry. You enter employee information on a secure Web page, which is then transferred directly to the provider.

Pricing

SurePayroll will process payroll in three steps plus calculate, file and pay federal, state and local payroll taxes for you. For a start-up employer with 10 employees on a bi-weekly payroll the cost would be $49.45 per payroll. There may be additional charged for paper checks.

Based on five employees paid on a bi-weekly basis companies like PayChex could be as low as $29.96 per month and ADP as high as $159.57. It all depends on the exact services needed. PayChex charges an additional $10 per month for state taxes and ADP has no state surcharge.

Find out what other BuyerZone users paid for their payroll services.