How do you Payroll?

[Ted S.]

Payroll Service? Do it yourself? Do you use a computer or call it in if you have a service?

Just curious.

[Dick Seibert]

Payroll Service? Do it yourself? Do you use a computer or call it in if you have a service?

Just curious.

Ted:

It depends upon your accounting system, for most of my career I did all accounting by hand, including payroll. When I went computer I went to QuickBooks and used a bank payroll plan. The problem was that the bank payroll doesn't enter the breakdown into the QuickBooks accounting so I had to break it down by hand and hand enter it into QuickBooks, very difficult to do accurately. My CPA hounded me on this for years so I finally broke down and bought QuickBooks' payroll plan, it does enter the amounts beautifully and accurately but is more expensive than bank payroll plans. If you use an accounting system other than QuickBooks I'd use their payroll, if they have one.

[davenorthup]

QB's payroll - takes 15 minutes a month and 1 hour at years end. Once set up it is quite easy to do. Payroll subscription runs about $300 per year and you have to update QB's every 3 years so it remains supported.

I just switched to MAC and Intuit does not allow payroll to run on a MAC so I have to run parallels...

[DWBuilder]

Quickbooks payroll. I have a QB user account set up for each of my employees so they enter their time, the associated job and payroll category. Their time is then associated with each job so job costing is a breeze. Their access is restricted to entering time only.

My wife checks the data entry vs time card for accuracy and prints out checks in about 15 minutes for weekly payroll.

QB creates and submits federal and state payroll tax forms electronically with a few clicks. Same thing with W-2's, W-3's and unemployment insurance.

Works very well and beats the heck out of the old methods for both speed and accuracy. Also I don't have to keep up with changing tax rates, like the recent SS tax reduction. QB updates the tax tables automatically so we are always in compliance. Best $300 a year you could spend.

[ContractorsBookkeepingSvc]

Ted,

Having been in construction and construction accounting for more than 30 years I have used most of the major payroll processing systems and services beginning with the manual pegboard paper system in the early 1970's.

We started using QuickBooks when it first came out in 1991 and when they added their payroll service a few years later we “put our toe in the water” and shortly afterwards jumped in full force.

We have used it to support our construction bookkeeping clients for over 20 years and it keeps getting better and better.

By the way some versions of QuickBooks will allow you to summarize payroll data in Excel which will give you a whole lot of in depth information you can use for Job Costing and Business Process Development.

I sincerely believe QuickBooks payroll subscription is a good value for the money.

Hope this helps.