Online payroll processing refers to any number of cloud-based solutions that streamline the payroll process and ensure the accuracy of your payroll. As a business owner, you have to attend to several different obligations every pay period, from payroll tax to withholding benefits and other necessary calculations.
With online payroll processing, this is taken care of by a program, not by a payroll administrator using pen and paper or Excel. This means your business saves time and lessens the chances of committing mistakes, which could be very costly in any given payroll. There are many services to choose from based on your company’s needs and budget.
What Other Benefits Does An Online Payroll Processing Offer?
When you need to access documentation as a business, you often need it as quickly as possible—and that starts with finding it, which could be difficult if your company is still managing payroll manually. The right online payroll processing system allows you to access documentation easily and securely. Do you need to know how much you’ve spent on payroll taxes? How many hours a particular employee worked in one week six months ago? What about how your benefits withholding is performing and whether you’re up-to-date on paying your benefits provider?
All of these questions and problems can be addressed efficiently with online payroll processing software. Query and answer process in the software is also usually known to be secure, meaning no one but you will have access to the answers or even to the questions you’ve asked. This is a boon for many businesses, which all need documentation from time to time but don’t need someone to spend the afternoon on it with a chance of finding no answer or the wrong one. Online payroll processing systems save you time in this way, and they ensure accuracy in a way in-house records can’t totally guarantee.
Why Might I Need Documentation?
When tax time rolls around, you need to report the financial activities of your business carefully; there is no room for error. Checking something that seems off could be the difference between a smooth and a very difficult (and potentially costly) tax experience. Fortunately, online payroll processing makes performing that check very easy as well as secure. You might also need answers about how your company is deducting child support, for example, a question whose answer can seriously impact your company’s well-being and even existence. Online payroll processing makes it easy to answer that question, as well as helping with that deduction in the first place.
Any business dealings with outside or regulatory entities might require payroll data from you. With online payroll processing, that data is right at your fingertips. You may need to prove that your payroll taxes are up-to-date, or dispute with a benefits provider about when they were last paid. You may even need to pull up documentation to show an employee why their paycheck amount was different from the last pay period, for example.
Bottom Line
All information is easily and securely available to you with online payroll processing, unlike in-house documentation where it could take hours to find a specific fact and even more time to verify it.
About the Author
Krisha Ladd has decades of experience working as an HR professional and is now publishing HR-related articles online. Krisha also provides content on business and financial management.
When Krisha is not too busy writing articles, she spends time by bonding with her children at home.