If you’re running a small business with one or more employees, then it’s important to make sure that your team is well-looked after. One important aspect of their wellbeing is the compensation that they get for working with you: your employees need to know that they will get all the wages and benefits they are owed promptly and without mistakes.
This can be a time-consuming and admin heavy task, so you may want to use a payroll service. They can help you with a number of tasks, keeping your staff happy and making life easier. Here are some of the things that a good payroll service should be able to do for you, aside from getting people paid on time:
Take care of tedious admin duties
From inputting employee details into the payment system to making adjustments and producing reports, you can leave the spreadsheets and paperwork to the experts. They’ll also prepare your employees’ payslips every month – possibly through an online portal – and provide P45s when employees leaves the company.
Ensure that the appropriate tax gets paid
Making simple errors can easily get small business owners into trouble with the taxman, so it’s important to ensure that all of the appropriate tax codes get applied when your payroll. A payroll company will be able to apply these correctly and answer any questions that you have about them.
Auto-enrol your workers into a pension scheme
A lot of people don’t realise that many good payroll services can also help you to set up pension auto-enrolment. This is now something that all businesses need to do by law – and trying to do it yourself can be time-consuming. It’s the sort of thing that can easily be overlooked, but also has the potential to get you into a lot of trouble, so make sure that you don’t get caught out!
Apply overtime or other adjustments to a salary
There are several good reasons for adjusting salaries on a monthly basis – for instance, people may work overtime or need to be repaid for expenses. A good payroll system will be able to easily make these adjustments as needed, helping you to avoid any errors in the amount that team members get paid.
Answer queries and provide expert information
Aside from completing the variety of payroll tasks needed to ensure that business runs smoothly, working with payroll experts can be a great alternative to hiring somebody with that specific skillset. They’ll be able to answer any queries that you have about how to structure your payroll and fill you in on industry best practice.
This is invaluable for a small team, where it is unlikely that you’ll have an employee who shares that expertise. Eventually, as you grow your company, you may want to consider hiring a dedicated accountant – but even for larger teams, a payroll service can be useful as it takes care of the admin work and leaves your employees to deal with other important tasks.
It can be daunting setting up your own business, so we’re definitely in favour of using expert services to take some of the pressure off. The important thing to remember is that you’re not just responsible for yourself anymore: as soon as you have other people working for you, you have additional obligations and responsibilities that specialised teams can help you stay on top of.
