Put simply, payroll is how your employees get paid. 

Unfortunately there are all kinds of rules, regulations and processes that go into it.  Whether you do payroll yourself or use a service, at a high level you will at least have to do the following:

 

Initial setup

Setup your company information.  This includes general information about your company as well as how you want your companies payroll run such as weekly, monthly and other information such as allowed and default entries for information such as states, wages, departments, types of employees, etc

Setup your tax and other deduction information such as determining what the tax rates in your area are.

Setup your employee information.  Setup how much each employee makes, whether they are salaried, hourly, W2, 1099, what their deductions are, etc.  Also setup their W-4.

 

Ongoing payroll runs

For hourly and other variable pay employees you will need a way for them to enter their time.

You will need to get ready for each payroll run..  You need to run reports ahead of time to check what the numbers will actually be and to make sure there is enough money to make the wage and tax payments.

Your will need to be actually run the payroll, get the payments direct deposited to employee bank accounts, pay the government authorities their taxes, print check stubs, stuff the envelopes and deliver the checks to your employees.

You will need to be able to enter this information in your accounting system.

You will need to be able to make ongoing adjustments for errors and other issues as well as make other changes such as employee terminations.  With these changes you will need to fix payments to employees, payments to the taxing bodies, and fix entries to your accounting system.

 

Quarterly and End of Year Processing

You will need to keep track of everything quarterly and may need to file information with government authorities quarterly.

You will need to process W2 and 1099 at the end of the year.

You may also need to respond to audit and government inquires throughout the year.

 

Call us at (312) 574-0080 if you have any questions about setting up payroll.