What is a Payroll Service?
A payroll service helps businesses manage payroll calculations, such as paying employees, calculating taxes, and maintaining accurate financial records. Payroll services also automatically remit payroll remittances to the CRA, and direct deposit employee’s pay cheques to their bank account.
Payroll software, such as Payment Evolution, ADP, Ceridian, and Wagepoint, have made managing payroll much easier for businesses. Lots of business owners are confused and overwhelmed by payroll and prefer to get professional help managing their payroll using a payroll system.
Common issues with Payroll Software
Payroll software and professional payroll support can help alleviate lots of common issues that business owners struggle with such as:
- Missed deadlines can lead to expensive penalties
- Incorrect treatment of payments like employee bonuses
- Incorrect treatment of statutory holiday pay or vacation pay
- Incorrect calculations of CPP, EI, and tax withholdings resulting in a Pensionable and Insurable Earnings Review (PIER)
- Issuing the wrong information slips resulting in a PIER
These are headaches that no one needs and the issues result in the business owner or bookkeeper having to put out fires instead of focusing on the business.
The problem with payroll service providers is that business owners still require an understanding of Canada’s complicated payroll rules, and how to work these systems. Business owners prefer a supported system that runs smoothly and with minimal input from them.
How to improve payroll services
As part of our Untangled small business accounting package, we support payroll services for our clients. Because we’re also handling your bookkeeping and use technology to automate much of the process, it’s faster, more accurate, less time-consuming, and typically less expensive than doing payroll on your own.
In most cases, the owner’s input is minimal after the initial set-up when employees are on salary. If there are hourly employees, the company simply has to input each employee’s hours. The software we use handles all the payroll withholding calculations payments to employees and the CRA, does all payroll filings, and produces T4 slips for the employees at the end of the year. We reconcile your T4s at the end of the year to make sure they are correct. Simple.
We will create a custom form for your business for onboarding new employees. Simply provide the web link to your employees, ask them to complete the New Employee form, and it automatically comes to us and we will get them set up!
Impacts of Payroll Errors
Payroll penalties for non-compliance are some of the worst in our tax system. Payroll errors can have significant impacts on both employees and employers, as well as potential legal and financial repercussions. Some of the key impacts of payroll errors include:
- Employee dissatisfaction
- Legal consequences
- Tax compliance issues
- Operational disruption
- Damaged reputation
We can assist you in implementing the controls necessary to avoid the above and ensure a reliable, efficient, and effective payroll system. With our help, we can connect you to the right resources to ensure that your payroll runs smoothly.
We can help simplify your payroll
Let Achen Henderson CPAs manage your bookkeeping and support you with payroll to ensure that errors do not happen. This will free you up to focus on the things that you are good at that really matter—like running your business. Contact us today to get started.