You run your own small business. You need your payroll done. Here are the least and the most expensive ways I’ve ever seen to get your payroll done.
LEAST EXPENSIVE PAYROLL: Your wife was a CPA who retired when children came along. You get her to make a spreadsheet that calculates payroll. She works for free. Spouses and family members working for free actually make up a measurable portion of how payroll gets done.
MOST EXPENSIVE PAYROLL: You only have a few employees so you figure you will do payroll in-house. You use QuickBooks. So for your one company with, say, 4 employees, full and part-time, you spend $299 each and every year for their tax table. Every 3 years Intuit forces you (to get the tax table) to upgrade the program itself, another $200. You buy their checks, their envelopes, their support plan because you need help getting the employees taxes, local taxes, garnishments, court orders, 401k set up. You have your CPA help (at $200/hr.) with setup or with the Quarterly tax returns and W2’s (you buy those from QuickBooks too). Now you either pay your receptionist to do it until what everyone makes starts getting around the gossip round, or a IRS tax penalty adds another $670 to the cost. Fact: that’s the average penalty incurred by 25% of businesses. So you take the job away from the receptionist and start doing it yourself because it has to be right. Congratulations, you’ve been promoted to the unpaid company clerk. You have not bothered to add up all the costs but you think this is saving money. You work for less than free. You could be smoozing customers, building your business, collecting receivables, but you are too busy.