Outsourcing

[OhBeWan]

Payroll is on a service. Need someone to do bookkeeping remotely. Then I need to find someone to produce checks locally. I can do all of this but I am wondering if those of you who are doing this are happy? Please tell me about your experiences doing this. Thanks.

[NeilZ]

Payroll is on a service. Need someone to do bookkeeping remotely. Then I need to find someone to produce checks locally. I can do all of this but I am wondering if those of you who are doing this are happy? Please tell me about your experiences doing this. Thanks.

Having switched from a 'service' that did that, to in house here's my 2 cents:

There are issues. Considering you have to setup all the accounts for employer liabilities, state taxes, health and other benefits, why have a service do the bookkeeping, when you still have to enter all the data and print the checks anyway?

Doing payroll 'in house' is just as easy, if not easier, than adding bills and paying them through AP. The hardest part is the setup. Once it is setup, there aren't usually any changes in salaries, or hourly wages until the beginning of the next year. That change takes all of 30 seconds per employee.

Federal Tax tables take maybe 15 minutes; state and local taxes are faster, when they do change which is not often. Even doing federal or state withholding deposits take 10 minutes, once a month as the system can prepare the reports needed.

Unless you have a church with more than10 employees, I would not even consider using a service, and even then, any service used would pay the employees as well as the taxes through EFT, and the only thing I'd have to worry about locally was the benefits payments. The problem though is entering that data into the system; which would again take more time than if I just ran payroll locally.

[cbrown]

We have two employees, including the pastor, and use a service. It costs $52 a month. All we do is have the hourly employee post her hours and the service handles all the rest. We get reports every month and I use those to enter the appropriate entries into PC. It takes me about five minutes to update the saved transaction. We don’t have to worry about filing tax forms, state unemployment forms, etc. the service does it all. Tremendous peace of mind.

[cbrown]

One more thing.....I don’t use the payroll module at all. I just use the accounting transaction entry process. If I need any detail reports I get them from the online resource from the service. They also take care of issuing the pay checks, so I don’t do any printing. Our employees have direct deposit. Easy peasy.

[NeilZ]

It does help if you have a service that does it all, some don't. Honestly, it doesn't take that much to do tax filing etc. Perhaps an hour or two a month. Even if you pay your admin $20.00 an hour, its still cheaper than a service, and everything flows directly to the Funds Accounting module.

That said, if it works for you, press on.

[cbrown]

Neil, the data input is not the part that concerns me. It’s all the tax and deduction knowledge I would need to acquire to stay out of trouble with the feds and New York. ADP works for me

[NeilZ]

Neil, the data input is not the part that concerns me. It’s all the tax and deduction knowledge I would need to acquire to stay out of trouble with the feds and New York. ADP works for me

Actually, the system takes care of the deductions, especially with the new W4 data entry. It figures the Federal tax, as well as the State Taxes. The hardest part is logging into the online tax systems to pay the withholding.

[kayleycun]

I will start off by apologizing if this isn't the right location for this post. I tried to search for similar topics, but couldn't find anything for my specific questions and then I found this. Well to be honest, I wasn't happy with my team anymore. Do you know any other outsourcing company that provides accounting services in this pandemic?

[NeilZ]

I will start off by apologizing if this isn't the right location for this post. I tried to search for similar topics, but couldn't find anything for my specific questions and then I found this. Well to be honest, I wasn't happy with my team anymore. Do you know any other outsourcing company that provides accounting services in this pandemic?

Depends on what you mean by 'outsourcing'. They were specifically talking about payroll here, please start a new topic as you're talking about full accounting. You can also look on the main Powerchurch site, under Training -> Independent Trainers some also provide outsourcing services.