Companies have obligations and must file things to employees. Payroll issues are complex for today’s high-tech business world. A company’s payroll department has many moving parts of employees’ pay. This includes the payroll processing, direct deposits into employees’ bank accounts, FICA, FICO, State Income tax payments to government agencies including the State and the Federal Government, reporting requirements, time and attendance tracking, company payroll management reports, worker’s compensation, 401k’s as well as other retirement account reporting, unemployment claims, vacation time-off and more. This is an enormous amount of detail to keep track of for a small company while also running a business. The more time a business owner spends on these items the less time is spent on building and managing the current business.
How Much Time Should be Spent on Payroll?
The logical answer to this question is for the business owner to calculate the time spent working on payroll each week, every other week or month and then multiply it out for 52 weeks, 26 weeks or 12 months. When all the totals for each time segment are calculated, then the business owner has to look at the actual cost of working on payroll by comparing the time value to the amount of business not generated related to working on payroll and not managing and building the business. To make the comparison and analysis work and be valid each payroll task must be included in the evaluation, managing tax reporting, employee benefits, retirement funds to name just a few. Over the years, several studies in actual numbers have shown that business owners spend 3 full weeks each year dealing with federal tax issues. Add all the hours working on all the other payroll issues and tasks and it becomes glaringly clear that managing payroll is very expensive both in terms of time and in business growth perspective. There’s no magic number or empirical study out there that says when a business owner needs to hire a payroll processing company, rather than do it themselves. However, it’s simple to evaluate if an owner is spending 10 – 20 % of their time working on payroll and all its related issues it’s likely time to consider a payroll processing company to save time and money and then to put those savings back into managing and building business.
Answer the following questions to help determine if it’s time to hire an outside payroll processing company:
- Is the time you spend on payroll is more than you like?
- Is your business expanding, hiring more employees and now is payroll becoming a much larger task than before?
- Are payroll mistakes becoming more expensive due to tax penalties for filing errors levied by the IRS?
- Is payroll taking so much of your time that the necessary time needed to manage and grow your business is being sacrificed.
From a common sense point of view, if the answer to this group of questions is yes, it makes good financial sense to outsource payroll processing. The monthly expense of payroll processing fees, while not insignificant, is doable for most businesses. The advantage of outsourcing payroll processing is the time savings, cost savings realized with the reduction of penalties and fines and the better focus of time on and energy towards building and growing your business.














