What is the most difficult part of payroll?

I took my accounting courses in college before there were computers, but I’m also proficient with spreadsheets, too. Yes, I had the skills to handle payroll taxes, assuming I would pay attention to all the updates that keep happening.

  HR Payroll   Apr 22, 2024   0   36  Add to Reading List

For the 15 years that I ran my business, I contracted out my payroll because I didn’t want to have to deal with keeping up on all the tax laws, and ensuring that I would be calculating everything correctly.

You’ve got Federal and state income taxes. Social Security and Medicare taxes. And possibly others that come out of the employees’ checks. Then there are all the taxes that the employer pays that don’t come out of the employees’ checks. And then there are all the filings that need to be done.

I took my accounting courses in college before there were computers, but I’m also proficient with spreadsheets, too. Yes, I had the skills to handle payroll taxes, assuming I would pay attention to all the updates that keep happening. And I could have dealt with the various tax incentives that come down the path when the government wants to encourage job creation. But those functions can be so time consuming that it’s hard to find the time to do much of anything else!

And whether I contracted that out or not, there’s still the problem of accurately reporting hours. Whether or not an employee turns in an accurate timecard, whether or not they punch in and out accurately, it’s still the employer’s job to ensure that they are being paid for the hours they work. So I still had to audit the time reports before transmitting them to the payroll company.

Payroll has to be done correctly. If you pay your employees incorrectly… well, there aren’t too many bigger sins than that. So making sure payroll was done correctly was a priority for the 15 years I ran my own business, and that’s something I learned from the years I was a manager for others, and when I was a union president before that as well. Accurate payroll is as important as things get.