As a small business deciding where to utilize your budget and where to save is a constant point of struggle. When you’re working with a tight and limited pool of funds, taking on tasks that would otherwise be outsourced is a sacrifice that often has to be made. Many of these decisions are no-brainers while others can be difficult to make. Should you do taxes yourself? Or leave that to the professionals at 3 Wise Bears? What about building the company website or doing your own marketing? Most of these will be answered by the pre-existing skills of yourself and your team, but for most small businesses, these will be performed in-house. Payroll is one of the most common tasks that small businesses owners decide to take on themselves. We’re going to tell you why you shouldn’t.
While many businesses still choose to manage their payroll internally through manual bookkeeping, more and more companies are seeing the benefits of using payroll software or hiring professionals such as Cloudpay to ensure their employees are paid on time, which leaves businesses time to focus on what they do best.
Here are the top reasons to stop manually keeping your books.
1. Consistency
When you have so much on your plate as all small business owners do, mistakes happen, often. Sending out a check late or for the incorrect amount not only leads to disgruntled employees, but it means you’ll need to go back and fix the error, wasting even more time and money than if it had been done correctly the first time. Consistency in Payroll also leads to a clean and tightly papertrail that will make tax season a breeze. Hiring a professional or using software like Gusto can give you peace of mind while you focus on other aspects of your business.
2. Increased Productivity
Leading in from our last point, regardless of how many employees you have, doing payroll yourself takes up a ton of time, especially to do so accurately and without error, whereas payroll software like Zenefits can drastically cut down on this time and streamline the whole process. Think about how much time it takes you to do payroll each month. No double it, because that’s what it actually takes you. Now think about what you could be spending that time doing and how much extra money that could bring to your business. Outsourcing Payroll or using small business payroll software can be cheaper than you might think, and the money you could be making with that time more than makes up for the cost.
3. Reduced Costs
Once again we’ll continue with our last point. Hiring new staff to carry out in-house payroll or spending money on training existing staff can be very costly. Additionaly, If they aren’t up to speed on all the ins and outs of government legislation and laws, mistakes can lead to expensive audits, fines and legal fees.
Putting your payroll in the hands of a professional or professional software can ensure that you are following the rules and playing by the books.
4. Security
Hopefully, if you do manually do payroll, you’re not doing so on pen and paper. If that is the case, you should understand the inherent security and liability risks involved in only keeping physical files for such important documents. Again, hopefully you’re at least doing your payroll on a computer. This does come with it’s own risks in regards to security. Hacking and cyber-attacks are all too common-place these days, and even small businesses are at a severe risk. The average PC can be hacked with very little knowledge as the extent of most small businesses security measures come down to a few simple passwords.
Using a system that has built-in security features will not only give you constant peace-of-mind but insure that the average hacker can’t access the kind of information that could bring all of your hard work to a crumbling halt.
If you’ve realized that it’s time to look into your payroll options, we recommend you check out both Gusto and Zenefits at the links below. Both of these services not only provide payroll, but HR as well!
