I am amazed at some of these posts. Why would you do your own payroll and then pay an accountant $137 a month to keep track of it when you can get the whole thing done for less than that? And $300 a month for book keeping? Nearly 4K per year?
If you pay your regular bills with QB and have ADP or similar handle payroll, you can have all that for a little over 1K per year and off-load the time commitment and payroll headaches as posted above by several posters.
2 hours to do payroll? 100 hours per year? What is your time worth? Are you willing to to make $10 an hour? Take that time and use it for marketing to build your business. Find organizations and businesses to visit. Become involved in communiy organizations like Rotary, Lions etc… the time time spent building the business will be FAR more valuable than the money spent on a payroll servcice.
Well I will say it is the best 137 a month I have ever spent. As I mentioned before we have been audited and there was nothing more supportive than my accountant sitting with them for 8 hours going over everthing and the cost to me ZIP. The conclusion was no changes. I could almost guarantee had I met with them alone (which is never recommended) I would have had a difficult time. It is also re assuring someone is looking over my accounting because I am not an accountant I am a pizzeria owner.
The time spent doing payroll is minimal maybe an hour…why pay someone to do it?
I have to account for over a million bucks every year so a measly 137 is worth it to me.
Piper, QB online is sweet, with 3 users, 1 for an accountant (yearly taxes), 1 for me, 1 for my asst book keeper, its really hard to beat - you can access it anywhere. QB prepares all the payroll AND tax forms (like Kris said, not that hard once you do it) including sales tax, all you do is verify (forms are sent electronically) (**you have to setup accounts with state and IRS) and schedule payment (EFT), most can be done EFT. I do not use their direct deposit, but instead use a biz gateway through my bank for EFTs. I suggest owners to really think about direct deposit: I require all employees to use direct deposit. Run payroll through QB and schedule EFTs through the bank (or QB if you’re willing to use them) = NO CHECK WRITING! I pay my tax accountant $700.00/yr to file corporate and personal returns. QB online is $49.95/mo. All said, about $1280/yr and no check writing. I’ve got a pretty tight handle on this part of it.
NOW, if I could only learn how to improve the darn phone system without paying an arm and leg!
You can do your policy through ADP or Paychex…they basically broker it out for you. I had Paychex do a quote for me and then also had my insurance broker quote it out and the Paychex quote was cheaper. Now that I am switching to ADP they offered to quote it out again for me since the policy is expiring next month and they let me know they could get it cheaper through a different company. I guess they have 5 or so companies that they can go through. I am guessing that ADP gets a discounted rate since the policy is going through them, but not exactly sure how they have it worked out.