The net amounts look good, payroll is submitted, and paychecks issued. Another payroll is done, right? Not quite.
Paychecks/stubs need to be sent to the employee
Are the funds available in the account(s), do you need to transfer monies to the proper accounts?
ACH file(s) need to be sent to the bank
Journal entries and/or reports need to be sent to accounting
Payroll taxes need to be paid
Do any employee benefits need to be processed and paid? i.e. 401k
Does employee information need to be updated? i.e. terminations, deductions, etc.
Extra payouts need to be reconciled and sent to accounting
Prepare employees/management for next pay period
Whether completing the tasks in-house or outsourced all the above items need to be addressed in order to completely process payroll and mark the task complete. The software you choose is vital to accomplishing payroll tasks with minimum effort. Here is how Scissortail and other outsourcing cut down on steps for me:
Since my company requires all employees to utilize direct deposit, I do not have to print or mail any paychecks. As soon as I finalize payroll and click the “Deliver” button, employees receive a notification that the stub is available for review. Included in the notification is a link into Scissortail to view/print that particular pay stub as well as any previous stubs. Once inside Scissortail, a dashboard is available showing the recent and historical data. There is also a button that will allow the employee to download any particular pay statement.
In addition to the automatic delivery of paychecks to employees, our company has also set up report templates to generate each time the “Deliver” button is used at the end of processing a pay period. One of the reports used is the “Payroll Recap Funding” which alerts accounting to the amount(s) needed in the bank account(s).
Scissortail also creates the ACH file(s) necessary to send to the bank. The file has already been formatted to comply with the bank’s requirements, it just needs to be uploaded to the bank.
The journal entry created by Scissortail includes all the necessary entries to properly code all payroll costs into our accounting software. That entry is also an automatic report that generates once the “Deliver” button is used. It is simply a matter of importing the entry into accounting. Once imported, accounting is able to review the entry before posting.
Fortunately, our company outsources payroll taxes and lets them deal with the headache of paying the necessary federal/state payroll taxes. Again, Scissortail creates a report in the format needed by the company so that they can process the taxes. Of course the taxes will need to be input into our accounting system and the report mentioned earlier, “Payroll Recap Funding”, is used by accounting to show the amount of taxes paid as well as the date paid.
Benefit reports are also generated by Scissortail since our company uploads information such as 401k contributions to the vendor itself. Again, the report is generated once the “Deliver” button is used and the report is sent to the appropriate party for processing as well as used by accounting to show contributions/deductions.
If there are any employee edits to make once payroll is processed, I will try to make those at this time i.e. terminations, deductions, etc.
Sometimes employees receive extra pay outs like an expense reimbursement. Since employees are able to upload expense reports into Scissortail, those costs are easily transferred to accounting.
Alerts for pay periods can be set up however works best for your company. Our company has set up alerts so that if an employee has forgotten to submit their timesheet by the due date, Scissortail will send a notification to the employee that it is due.
Payroll is much more than just cutting checks and any tools we can use as payroll administrators to cut down on time spent as well as mistakes, only benefits everyone. I like to let Scissortail do all the hard work for me!
Contact Linda or one of our other team members today if you would like to know more about what Scissortail can do! When it comes to your company's payroll, accounting, and more, CS3 Technology is happy to sit down and talk about what you need from your software and teach you about what else your software can do.
