Tips to Bring Payroll Into The Modern Business Model

Diving in to the often untouched and outdated method of paying talent can be a bit tedious, but it’s important to do if you are going to do right by your employees. We get it, spending lengthy amounts of time on payroll is a non-value added activity and outsourcing it to the top common vendors may not be the best fit for a small business or start up. It’s also extremely important, so you need to be on top of it. The exciting news is that there are a few modern day methods that can bring your payroll functionality into the 21st century and ease your administrative burden.

Take Care of Your Talent: Onboard With Empathy

If you are a growing business, chances are you couldn't function without the daily efforts and talents of your people. This is why it is so important that they get your best efforts on the employer side when it comes to onboarding and payroll. These are the people that rely on you as a business owner to pay them fairly and on time. Giving more than the norm when welcoming a new employee can really set a positive tone from the get go. This means getting serious about cash flow management so that payroll is never a last minute crunch. It also means doing your best to accommodate a gracious onboarding, diligent payment and an easy to access system for your employees for updates.

Better Payroll Systems Mean a Gracious Onboarding

What do we mean by “gracious on-boarding”, you say? Hear us out by recounting the classic hiring experience. The typical process of onboarding an employee can mean a lot of manual paperwork. An HR or Admin type of individual asks you to scribble a ton of personally identifiable information, i.e. social security number, bank account info, etc. on a thrown together .doc form. He or she then prints it out and sends it off to whatever overbuilt payroll processing company they use. Or, you filled out a stack of pre-printed forms (which saved you the frustrating reformatting of said .doc form because it drove you nuts to see it all out of whack). Either way, it’s bulky and time consuming on the employee and employer ends.

To add more frustration to the mix, you don’t get paid the next pay period either. After about two to three weeks of spending time and money driving to the new workplace, you still don’t see that first paycheck until after the initial hours are spent. Some companies even send out a paper check for this delayed first payment too. Not cool.

What if you had enough cash to cover your new talent and the tools to pay them in line with the usual pay period instead of stringing them out over multiple weeks? This is definitely doable and a great effort to start off graciously.

Payroll Management Designed For The Modern Small Business

When companies have an intuitive, automated and less administratively burdensome payroll process, onboarding can be a welcoming function. After all, you need great talent with high standards, so treat them accordingly. The key to proactively managing payroll comes down to two things - easy to use streamlined (and automated) functionality and cash flow up keep to account for the money to be spent on payroll.

Accountfully uses an amazing program to manage payroll called Gusto. It’s tailor made for modern small businesses that need something well suited for their operation and much less cumbersome. It automates, it’s nice to your employees and it is well suited for the smaller operation.

The Top Benefits of Using Our Modern Payroll System

Gusto has redefined payroll by making it approachable from both the employer and employee perspective. It provides the following benefits to ease the administrative burden of a company and its employees:

1. An Easy to Use Self Service Process and Employee Portal. Employers send an invite to the employee’s email address to initiate the process. New employees can fill out their information online and access their account for any tax forms or pay stubs. This portal allows the employee to sign all relevant state and federal tax forms electronically too. As time goes on, they can also easily change their email address and personal info, such as a new address or new tax withholding amounts.
2. Clean and Organized Emails With Fun Quips and Visuals.Payroll is not in itself a fun thing, but it really helps seeing Gusto’s cheery notices and cool graphics.  They send pay stubs in fun 

1. payday emails with subjects like “Hooray! You Got Paid” with charming piggy bank graphics that are sure to make you giggle. It seems small, but just having the happy vibe in the program truly does take a bit of the blah out of it. They also show user friendly, easy to understand charts showing take home and tax amounts.
2. Automatically Pays And Sends Payroll and Tax Forms, Like W2s: On the employer side, Gusto automatically remits and files payroll taxes and forms. Another great automation to stay out of the weeds of payroll, is Gusto’s ability to automatically add employee W2s in the employee portal. It will upload them and alert the employee when they are ready.

Stay on Top Of Cash Flow and Away From the Hourly Trap

The three things that are limited in business are talent, time and money. Treat your employees right and make it easier on yourself as an employer by staying away from the nickel-and-dimer mindset of having a bundle of hourly workers and juggling who gets paid in which pay period. Take away some of this burden and pay them as salaried employees if you can. When you are fostering good faith with your talent, suddenly the money is well spent. The time saved on manually managing payroll items will be an increase in efficiency; and therefore, a cost savings.

As a business owner, it is up to you to make good decisions around pay periods so that your cash flow is not at risk and your talent is taken care of and paid on time. You can also make the choice to put in the additional effort of taking care of your people in a modern fashion. Accountfully offers the tools to help businesses do just this. By managing your day to day and helping forecast cash flow, we help you keep your talent taken care of.

We’d love to help you make payroll less clumsy and more efficient. Talk to us about our recommended systems and how your operation could use some attention.