If you’re looking into working with a payroll provider like CSI for your small business, you can expect many things to be taken off your plate. However, since a service isn’t in-house, they can’t know everything about your business’s payroll.
You need to know how things will be handled. What can you expect a payroll service to cover, and what will you need to help them with?
At CSI Accounting & Payroll, we’ve worked with small businesses for over 50 years. In all that time, we’ve talked to thousands of clients about how we handle payroll services. They’ve often wanted to know:
- Who handles the onboarding and setup of CSI’s payroll service?
- Who runs payroll each pay cycle?
- Who makes changes and takes care of other features?
Onboarding & Setup of a Payroll Service
When you sign up with any payroll service, they can’t just start paying your employees. First, they need to gather all of the information they need to get your account set up.
What You Need to Do
To get your account set up, you need to provide the data that needs to be entered and grant your provider access to your payroll tax accounts.
Unless you’re a new business that hasn’t run payroll before, you should already have your payroll data organized. It may even be as simple as asking your prior payroll provider to download your data from their portal and send it to you.
As for the payroll tax accounts, you need to grant your payroll provider access by making them an agent. This is to authorize the service provider access to the tax account, which can be used to:
- Make updates to the account when needed
- Pay payroll taxes
- File tax returns
What a Payroll Provider Does
After getting your data, your payroll provider handles the rest of the payroll system setup. They enter a variety of historical data and current employee information, such as:
- Pay rates
- Forms W-4
- Deductions
- Pay items
- Direct deposit information
After that, you’re ready to start paying your staff!
Running Each Payroll
Every time you need to pay your workers, that’s called running a payroll. Let’s talk about who handles certain parts of running each payroll.
What You Need to Do
Before your payroll can be run, you need to let your payroll specialist know the details. Each pay cycle, you need to report your payroll data per employee, such as:
- Hours worked
- Commissions and bonuses earned
- Reimbursements needed
- Deduction amounts
There may also be other data you need to submit for each payroll if your employees have unique situations.
Also, if anything changes with the payroll data, you can easily make those changes in your portal. There’s no need to ask your payroll specialist to do it for you!
What if you don’t want to enter your payroll data? CSI offers an add-on payroll data entry service, although this will come with an additional fee.
After all of this is in place, you can preview your payroll and submit it to your payroll specialist to close it.
When do you need to provide information each pay cycle? If you work with CSI and offer your employees direct deposit, you may need to submit this information four business days before pay day, but shorter timeframes can be accomodated for established businesses.
What a Payroll Provider Does
Every pay cycle, your payroll provider reviews the information that you submit. Then, if everything looks normal from their perspective, they close it.
After that, they use the finalized data to create pay statements (sometimes referred to as pay stubs). They calculate how much each worker will get paid, how much tax needs to be withheld (since compliance is always important), and how much needs to be taken out for deductions. Finally, they will move all of the money to where it needs to go.
Making Changes & Managing Features
There can also be data outside of what is recorded for each payroll. Sometimes unique one-off situations occur, such as the examples we cover below. Who handles these?
Filing Quarterly Tax Returns
Every business has to file quarterly tax returns – Form 941. This is how you report how much money you paid your employees, the amounts and dates that tax liabilities were incurred, and how much of the tax liabilities you paid.
If you work with CSI, we handle this for you as part of a standard payroll package. The average small business owner struggles with this, so we take the compliance off of their plates. We don’t need any information from the client to do this accurately and on time.
Adding New Employees to Payroll
When you hire a new employee, who takes care of adding them to your payroll?
This is something that you can opt into having your payroll specialist handle for you. Otherwise, your payroll specialist can show you how to do it, and then you can choose to do it yourself for future hires.
Reporting New Hires
It’s required by state law to report when you hire new employees or re-hire old ones.
If you inform your payroll specialist of the hire and which state they’re in, they have the information to handle the rest and will send the form to the state for you.
Adding New Pay or Deduction Items
If you need to add a new pay item or deduction item, your payroll specialist will need to be in the loop.
If you work with CSI, we handle this for you so we can ensure the taxability is correct.
Handling Garnishments
Garnishments (like child support) are not optional if you have an employee who is being garnished, but having CSI handle the payment can be optional.
At CSI, if you have employees who have garnishments, we can set it up in our system and allow you to handle the payments.
Otherwise, we can also handle the payments for you for an additional fee. In either case, you would just need to give us the income withholding order, which would give us all the information we need.
Reporting to Retirement Plans
This is treated similarly to handling garnishments. If your employees contribute to their retirement plans, it needs to be reported. However, funding the accounts is again optional and involves an additional fee.
At CSI, we can set up the employee and employer calculations in our system and allow you to transmit the data to your plan provider to fund the accounts.
Otherwise, we can also handle the data transmission and account funding for you for an additional fee. You would have to provide us with the plan details to us first, though.
Handling Workers’ Compensation Insurance Audits
This is also treated similarly to handling garnishments. Annual workers’ compensation insurance audits are mandatory if you hold workers’ compensation insurance.
If you work with CSI, you can choose to handle the audit yourself. We offer Pay As You Go, so the exact amount is collected each payroll. That means there isn’t much to do when it’s time for the audits.
However, if you don’t want to handle the audits, we can handle them for you for an additional fee.
Get Payroll off of Your Plate!
Now that you know about who handles the onboarding and setup of a payroll service, who runs payroll each pay cycle, and who handles other features, are you ready to check out payroll services?
If so, please consider CSI Accounting & Payroll! To see if we can be a good fit for your business, click the button below for a free consultation:
Not ready to talk? That’s okay! First, learn more about the cost of a payroll service by clicking the image below:
