Do It Yourself Or Outsource? The Payroll Question.

PipeGuy

I outsource my weekly payroll processing (6 checks per week + 2 direct deposits). The service is great and I think it's some of the best money I spend.
Can you make money doing your own payroll? If so, what does it take to get there?

Grumpy

Quickbooks has aneat built in feature. They have 4 levels of payroll. Completely non assisted, partially assisted. They do it for you and totally outsourced.

Payroll is confusing to me. At this point I pay myself a salary plus commission for the jobs I sell. When I have an employee I will start to worry about the pay roll taxes blah blah blah, and that's when I am going to have quick books assist me.

If I had an office manager, A) that person would be highly intelligent and skilled in running an office b) I would push the payroll responsibility onto them.

Unregistered

you can't make money doing your own payroll, you would only save the cost of the service. Payroll is not difficult, all my guys are paid salary, so the numbers are the same for each pay period, which helps a lot.

The biggest benifit is that the service collects all the payroll and attached liabilities so you are forced to keep current on your payroll taxes, which can add up very quickly if you don't set the funds aside.

Find one that does your Workmens Comp. reports for you and you are golden.

Teetorbilt

Office costs are business expenses, even outsourced.

Grumpy

The way I look at outsourcing, in general, is this:

If it takes it X ammount of time to do something and my time is worth $N then what is that task costing me?

If I outsource it will it be done faster, better and for about the same $?

Even if the $ is a little bit more... I said a little bit... Then it's probably worth outsourcing as long as they do as good a job and as fast a job as you can do. At very least they should be able to do a better job for about the same $.

TRC

I plan on doing all my own payroll in the beginning for a couple of reasons. 1. I'm just starting up and need to keep all costs to a minimum. 2. I think it's important for a business owner to have some experience with every phase of operation.

As soon as my time becomes more valuable, meaning I'll have a lot of jobs, then I will probably start to outsource it. Bear in mind that in the beginning I will only have 1 employee's check to worry about. The important thing is that you track it all properly in quickbooks and make sure you're withholding the correct amounts.