Home Forums Discussions Problems Do you do your staff salary checks inhouse?

My current arrangement re: staff paychecks is as follows:

My manager calculates the time staff worked in office in base 100(from hrs/mins to say 32.75 hrs) and faxes to my accountant. He calculates the taxes, prints the checks and then mails them to me, I sign and give it to staff. Also every mth he calculates the fed and state taxes and dials into EFTPS and punches in those numbers and sends me a memo about those taxes. I enter them in my check book.

Does your office manager in your office calculate the taxes based on current rates and prints the checks and do you do these check printing inhouse? Does your OM also dial into EFTPS?

Iam trying to cut back on my overhead with my accountant. Any tips?

Regards.

Joesph,

I have looked into the in house payroll programs and, for those who are not mathematically challenged or afriad of screwing up state and federal taxes, they are probably very user-friendly. But, as I am one of those as formerly described, I have chosen to stick with a payroll service...Paychex. I have a computer-based Time Clock "It's About Time"; but there are several others out there some of which are free and which I may look at to replace my current one. This keeps up with each employee's hours. At the end of the pay period, we call the worked hours into Paychex. They then calculate all the taxes and also keep up with each employees' PTO (based on the rate we assign and what the employee uses that pay period). They mail me the checks with a month and year-to-date pay/PTO stub and I sign them. They also keep up with all the quarterly taxes and provide the end-of-year W2s, nicely printed out and ready for distribution. I pay about $70/month for the service. I have trimmed a lot of my overhead elsewhere by doing things in house but have continued with Paychex.

Leslie

We outsource our as well, I believe it's a place Buxar, India. No really we do. I was going to use a time card type thing; but my biggest problem is getting any of my to not stay over. Mots stay 30 minutes to an hour and don't mark it down. Go figure.

I do all payroll by myself using QuickBooks. It is very simple and only takes 10-15 minutes a month. I made a simple Excel form for each employee to enter hours. Each employee enters his/her hours into the Excel form on daily basis, prints out the forms and brings them to me twice a month. I enter the amount of hours to QuickBooks and it instantly calculates salary, taxes, sick time, vacation time, etc. I print stabs for each employee and sign checks. Each month I pay payroll taxes using EFTPS. QuickBooks calculates amount of social security/medicare/federal tax, I enter this amount into EFTPS. It takes another 5-10 minutes a month.

apricot,

That's awesome! Maybe I can send my payroll to you.


Is stabs supposed to be stubs? Was that a Freudian slip? LOL

We also do payroll in-house using Quickbooks.

Like Barbara and Apricot, I roll our own paychecks. I use an Excel spreadsheet and then enter the values into Quickbooks. To use Quickbooks you need to purchase updates of payroll tax schedules which adds to the cost of writing a check.

In-house with QuickBooks. No sweat.

Ok, I have the silly hybrid method. oh, and the staff right now is just me and the MA (I dont need to issue a check for Dr. Coghill).

I have a nice Excel timesheet to be filled out daily. The MA gives me her timesheet every two weeks. I check the hours she has listed and then call the total hours to be paid into our accountant.

They will send me an email with the hours, gross salary, net pay, and tax dedcutions.

I then input this into Quickbooks (go ahead and flame me.) If any of the hours to be paid are from "Personal Time Off" or Administrative Time Off" I will input this into Quickbooks. This allows us to keep track of the available "time off" which is done on an accrual basis.

Overall, I hate this current system, but it is a slight improvement of what we had before. (no laughs from the peanut gallery guys). I'll try to come up with something better when I have the time. The one-man-army is currently engaged seemingly in a quagmire and can't take on another mission.

Oh, I then write the checks by hand and give them to Vicky to sign. I print the check stubs from quickbooks.

I'd rather input the the worked and time-off hours into Quickbooks and have it AUTOMATICALLY GENERATE the tax witholdings right then and there. Then I could just write (or print) the checks and/or check stubs RIGHT THEN. I'm sure this is possible if I can just find time to find out what extra thingy I need to buy and verify if this is less expensive than the accountant (how can it not be?)

You need to sign up for one of those.
intuit payroll
Just talk to your accountant and see which one he wants you to have. For example, I do all payroll and payroll/unemployment taxes by myself. Four times a year I email by Quickbooks database to my accountant, he prints out 1040 forms, I sign them and mail them to IRS.

Thanks for the tip Apricot. I'll check into this.

I feel left out on this one. My practice consultant does all these.

We use Sure Payroll, they do everything from soup to nuts, too. I dump in our hours, they withdraw taxes that night, and then I print out checks two days later. They also have personnel stuff available (ie: forms, hiring/firing, 401k set ups, etc.). So far they've been really easy to use.

Sorry you're out of the loop, Bert, but some loops are better than others???

Use PayChex. They are right from this area in Buffalo NY and employ many real on shore Americans! Really. As much as I am left of center and he is very right of center, I am a supporter of Tom Golasano who ownes them. He is a capitalist of decent values and has invested a great deal of his money is good things for upstate NY including buying and saving the Buffalo Sabres (NHL hockey team). And if you think that is a drop in the bucket it is not. The team itself contributes a lot to the local economy, keeps the arena open for lots of stagehands and support staff.

And remember unlike most of the other major sports, hockey has a real minor league system, like baseball that most of their players come thru. College players are for the most part, true students. Yes they are still hand picked and give scholarships, but they really are students. Those that are dumb as a rock, play only in the juniors and minors, not in college using our tax dollars as a free minor league system, abusing both citizens and the players, like football and basketball both do. Brian Leech, Mike Richter, Tony Amonte and the rest really were smart enough to go to college and did. And so the Sabres have a local farm AHL club here to one city away in Rochester too. And unlike a college that gets taxes breaks, they instead contribute lots of money and taxes to the local economy. I am sick and tired of the NBA and the NFL getting a free farm system from our private and public colleges. They should not be able to have access to these players unless they establish a real farm system for the majority of their potential players who are not college material. If Major League Baseball and the NHL can do so can they. Anyway....

Now I know it is way off topic, but if you were to use a service, paychex kicks ADP's butt in terms of customer service, better reports including those availible to you if you need a weird one later one, and they really do support and give back to their local community. Hey they even sponsored a large hospital wing in Rochester I think. And like ADP they offer the "no tax penalty" promise. If they mess up, they pay the fines...

Thank you once again all my friends. Love your wonderful suggestions.

So I spoke with my accountant. We have something called Client Bookkeeping Solutions (see footnote)installed to print checks for other people, like that snow removal guy.

He has to turn on the feature, allowing me to print paychecks inhouse. Once implemented it should save $75.00 Per mth x 8 mths, as the other 4 mths in yr, he has to do quarterly statements. I can't do those quarterly statements.

The advantages of CBS is that they give annual tax table updates free to everybody who buys their software. It would communicate with what he uses in his office.

http://cs.thomson.com/client/

I've been using “Intuit Complete Payroll” for several years now and overall I find it to be grossly inadequate. The database is not user friendly and it makes mistakes for which my office manager or myself is routinely blamed even though they know their software has major kinks.

I am currently migrating to “Assisted Payroll” which will allow me to use my QuickBooks to issue my payroll and continue to deposit electronically but with more control. I am hoping it is better but I've already had software troubles. I have also had possibly the worst service of my career with these people particularly related to this migration. I am hoping this will change, however, I must say they are apparently not in a position to care whether or not their customers are satisfied or even treated reasonably well. I'll re-post in a few months and hopefully with good news!

Well, thanks for the heads-up on Intuit Complete Payroll. But if that is so bad, I'd be worried about Assisted Payroll since its the same company. Which is bad for me since I was thinking of getting the payroll module for Quickbooks.

Intuit's customer service is starting to go downhill a bit. They've got Microsoft Syndrome I think. They've become so popular that they start being mainly concerned if you have a second person sometimes using your single license of rather expensive software but don't concentrate on the s/w features work smoothly and are comprehensive. In fact, they intentionally leave capabilities out to get you to upgrade to the next configuration. Like Windows Vista.

I have had an accountant doing payroll, but changed to ADP Payroll services 5 years ago and would never go back to either Quickbooks, or my accountant. First of all ADP does everything, they file your Payroll taxes for state and Federal, they deposit the money as an autodraft from your checking acct. (w your permission), they generate payroll checks and stubs, keep track of hours, overtime, vacation, bonuses, etc, etc. You can enter the hours for each employee by calling in , on the web, or tele-touching the figures for each employee every 2 wks for biweekly payroll, then they calculate all deductions, and issue you hardcopy checks via FedEx within 24 hrs. You only have to hand the check out to the employees. They will also do electronic deposit for them if they prefer. We have a Flex Plan for benefits and so they cut a check to the 401 K account also for us. The cost to me is about $60 dollars each pay period for 8 employees. This includes the end of year tax deposits and W2 statements w/ envelopes also. I was so pleased w/ this service, that I told some of the other practices in our building and they have done the same w/ similar results.
The last kicker for this ADP Payroll thing is that you get a discount thru Physicians Alliance as they are on their list of discounted services available thru them , similar to POS, Office Max, PSS, and others.

Check it out, truly it was hard to believe it could be so simple.

We use paycycle.com
Reasonable price, plus we can pay all our payroll taxes right through their online portal. It reminds you when taxes are due and calculates them for you. Also allows for direct deposit for us and employees. Keeps track of vacation days. We are pretty happy with it.

Is that Physician's Alliance Inc.?