Payroll Services for Small Businesses
Stander & Company can handle your payroll services, ensuring your employees get paid on time and that their checks are correct.
Challenged With Managing Payroll?
In reality, handling payroll probably eats up more of your time than you realize. The problem is that the time involved in handling payroll is deceptive. Each element of handling payroll seems straightforward. However, put the pieces all together, and they become complicated and time-consuming. Unless you are a payroll specialist, handling payroll yourself usually costs more time and money than it would to hire a payroll services company.
Payroll complexity also increases subtly. As your company grows, you add additional employees. You may offer new benefits. Your taxes get more complicated. Before you know it, what was once a simple process has become a monkey on your back.
The more you struggle with handling payroll basics, the more likely you will miss some of the financial benefits a comprehensive payroll program can add to your business. Compliance, recruiting, benefits, taxes, and cash flow are only a few of the areas of your business that payroll impacts.
Let Stander & Company get that monkey off your back and help you turn your payroll program into an asset for your business.
Do you need payroll services?
Businesses decide to outsource their payroll services for a variety of reasons.
- You spend too much time on payroll but not enough time to hire an individual to manage payroll in-house.
- You have added employees and can no longer efficiently manage payroll.
- You have increased employee benefits and need to coordinate benefits with payroll processing.
- You have employees with garnishments or other withholding orders.
- You want to offer employees benefits that your current approach to payroll does not support.
- You want easily scalable payroll.
Whatever reason you have for considering outsourcing your payroll department, Stander & Company can meet your needs.
Who is Stander & Company?
At Stander & Company, we handle the complete array of financial coaching, advice, and services for small and medium businesses. More than a bookkeeping service or payroll provider, we work with accountants who understand business finances. We can help you choose the right payroll solutions for your company and coordinate those payroll services with our business coaching.
Payroll is mission-critical for employee morale.
When you think of payroll, you probably think about paying your employees. Even if you are not, we guarantee that when your employees think of payroll, they think about paychecks. No matter how great your company is, your employees do not want to work for free.
At its heart, determining an employee’s weekly wage means multiplying the hours they worked by their hourly wage. It seems like it should be simple.
Some weeks it is. Some weeks, it is just not that easy. Things that can complicate payroll calculations include:
- Overtime
- Shift Differentials
- Holiday Pay
- Bonuses
- Sick Days
- Vacation Days
- Paid Time Off (PTO)
It can seem like a full-time job for a large company to determine who should be paid for how many hours each week. No matter how complicated determining payroll becomes, you still need to get checks to employees on time.
That is what we mean when we say that payroll is mission-critical to your business. Want an immediate decline in employee morale? Then, miss paying your employees on time or make repeated errors in their paychecks.
Stander & Company can handle your payroll services, ensuring your employees get paid on time and that their checks are correct.
Payroll is part of comprehensive financial management for your company.
However, handling payroll is more than writing checks. It involves time-consuming back-end work that impacts your HR functions, bookkeeping, financial planning, and tax preparation.
Payroll withholding directly relates to your tax obligations, to legal compliance, to benefits, to human resources, and more. If we handle your payroll services, we can integrate payroll with other aspects of your company’s finances. If you have another company running your business’s financial services, we can help integrate our payroll services with those providers.
Payroll services can help you prepare your business for growth.
You may not associate payroll with growth, but the two are fundamentally linked. Payroll processing requires having the available cash to pay your employees every pay period. If you are struggling to process your payroll, then you may be keeping more cash available than you need to meet those obligations. That can keep you from investing your money in other parts of your business.
When we handle financial coaching clients, two of our goals are monthly financial consulting and cash flow improvement. Payroll processing can help meet both of those goals.
In addition, if you are devoting time to payroll, you have less time to concentrate on other areas of the business. That means that you are missing opportunities for growth. Outsourcing your payroll to a company that focuses on getting out paychecks and strategy development, tax preparation, and financial strategies frees up time for you to take advantage of growth opportunities.
Seneca said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” By taking steps to free up ready cash and your time now, you position yourself to take advantage of opportunities when they occur.
We can help you with time-tracking.
One of the most time-consuming payroll elements is trying to determine hours worked when you do not have a reliable time-tracking system. If you have hourly employees, payroll must start with time-tracking. If you cannot determine how many hours someone worked, you cannot pay your hourly employees.
Yet, many small-to-medium-sized businesses do not have sound time-tracking systems. That means that you have to waste time tracking down employees to ask about their hours before you can even begin processing payments. Even if you decide not to go with us as your payroll processing company, please do yourself a favor and get a reliable time-tracking tool that you can integrate with a payroll processing system.
Time tracking tools run the gamut from pen and paper to GPS tracking. Not every tool works for every business. However, we do want you to use a consistent and reliable means to track employee time and submit it a single time into your payroll system.
Every time you have to resubmit data, you waste time. Time is money. Our goal is to help you save both. We help pick the right tool and integrate it into your system.
Payroll calculations must consider withholding.
Withholding is a broad category that refers to money an employer holds back from an employee’s paycheck. Employers should be withholding federal income taxes, Social Security, and Medicare from most employee paychecks. You may also be withholding unemployment, benefits, or garnishments.
Withholding would be easy if it were just a percentage of pay. It is not. Withholding amounts can be fixed, a portion, or a tiered rate. You may be liable for specific errors, so getting your withholding correct is critical.
There is another step after withholding. That step is getting the withheld money to the correct location. If you withhold taxes, you have to get the taxes to the government. Money withheld for benefits pays for those benefits. We take out the right amount for withholding and set up a pathway to get to the right destination.
Stander & Company can make sure you get garnishments correct.
As you add employees, you are more likely to see garnishments. They are extremely common since most people who pay child support are subject to a garnishment order. Tax or school loan obligations can also lead to garnishments.
These court orders direct that a portion or percentage of an employee’s check get withheld and sent to a third party. The order will explicitly detail things like how much to withhold and where to send those wages. While the orders are straightforward, handling them can become complicated, especially if you have multiple employees subject to garnishment. Failure to comply can make the company liable instead of the person subject to the garnishment. It can also put your employees at risk.
Stander & Company handles garnishments every day. We know the appropriate way to calculate garnishment orders for each pay period, submit the garnished money to the court, and keep a record of garnished money to use for tax purposes at the end of each year.
It can seem like a full-time job for a large company to determine who should be paid for how many hours each week. No matter how complicated determining payroll becomes, you still need to get checks to employees on time.
That is what we mean when we say that payroll is mission-critical to your business. Want an immediate decline in employee morale? Then, miss paying your employees on time or make repeated errors in their paychecks.
Stander & Company can handle your payroll services, ensuring your employees get paid on time and that their checks are correct.
We will save you time, which will save you money.
Our new customers frequently tell us they are surprised by how much time we save them. That is because when you think about time spent on payroll, you usually consider that chunk of time dedicated to getting out checks.
However, we save time in three ways:
- Original payroll computations
- Fixing payroll errors
- Coordinating with taxes
We can help you determine how to pay your workers.
Some of the companies we work with are confused about how to pay their workers. They opt to pay them as independent contractors because it is easier. If a worker is an employee, the employer must:
- Withhold Income Taxes
- Pay Social Security
- Pay Medicare Taxes
- Pay Unemployment Taxes
If a worker is an independent contractor, the employer is not responsible for withholding. Instead, the worker pays self-employment taxes. So, you might think it would be more convenient to make all of your workers independent contractors.
If only it were that easy. The IRS has rules about who is an employee. If you can control what the worker does, how the worker does it, and the outcome of the work, then the IRS considers them an employee. While it may seem more complicated to treat workers like employees, the correct designation helps you avoid legal problems from the wrong identification.
As a Payroll Service Provider, Stander & Company can work with your tax professionals to ensure that workers have the correct designation. Suppose you do not have tax professionals working with your company. In that case, we can expand our working relationship and connect you with our affiliated CPA, who can help you answer those questions.
We can reduce the number of errors in your payroll process.
We are not going to promise you error-free payroll services. Payroll involves human interactions. Employees tell you when they clock in or have to call in sick for vacation days, etc. Because humans are involved, errors are always possible. So, as much as we would like to do so, we cannot promise you perfection.
What we can promise is near-perfection. Our goal is to reduce payroll errors to their lowest possible level. We also want to eliminate payroll errors on your end. If the paycheck is wrong because of an employee’s mistake, it is inconvenient, and you want to fix it ASAP, but the blame sits on the employee. On the other hand, the payment is incorrect because of your error; you lose employee confidence.
Perhaps more importantly, payroll errors can be extremely costly mistakes. In addition to the time and expense associated with fixing them, payroll mistakes can:
- Expose you to legal liability
- Impact employee retirement
- Mess up employee benefits
- Impact child support, putting employees at risk
- Complicate your taxes
While there is no way to completely goof-proof your payroll, having Stander & Company handle your payroll can decrease the risk of mistakes.
You will need to provide your payroll provider with information to get started.
Once you have chosen us as your provider, we get started with the technical information. We will need you to provide us with:
- Your Employer Tax ID Number
- Employee Social Security or Tax ID Numbers
- Your Pay Periods
- Employee Designations
- Benefit Eligibility
- Garnishment Orders
- Voluntary Payroll Deductions
Do not worry if it takes time to gather those things; we tailor the onboarding process for you.
Is Stander & Company the right payroll services provider for you?
Maybe.
We are a niche company. We have grown out of a passion for helping small businesses manage their financial affairs in a way that positions them for growth. We take a holistic approach to finances because we believe that is the only way to maximize our clients’ abilities to take advantage of opportunities. Some clients love it. Some potential clients only want someone to process the paperwork.
That is why we start our relationship with a conversation. We spend the time to find out about your business and its unique needs. We encourage you to ask questions and find out about us. You should feel like we will save you time and money, make your job easier, and put you in a position to grow. We should feel the same way.
If we do not seem like the right fit for you, we will thank you for your time and consideration and try our best to steer you towards a company that better suits your needs. If we both agree that Stander & Company can add value to your company, we start the onboarding process.
We look forward to starting that conversation.
