11 early signs of payroll pains

Startups and most entrepreneurs share a common vision of focusing on growth. As they get their businesses off the ground, secure funding and begin to hire employees, most turn to simple accounting and payroll solutions like QuickBooks. It provides a low-cost solution that will handle the basics of bookkeeping, pay a small workforce and send summary level payroll information back to the general ledger to account for compensation and benefits expenses.

Rapid growth starts to push entry-level payroll software to its limits and could be the first area where businesses feel pain. To make sure payroll won’t slow growth down, look for these 11 early warning signs:

1. A lot of hiring occurs rapidly, creating new complexities in terms of payroll size, frequency and accuracy.
2. Leaders and managers start to request more details about payroll costs from your general ledger for planning purposes.
3. Timesheets are needed, but your vendor wants an additional fee for that functionality.
4. You need to move to a different edition of QuickBooks payroll and pay more to get features like user-based security to help protect sensitive payroll information.
5. The list of payroll-related vendors such as insurance carriers and benefit providers begins to grow, and you can’t automate payments through accounts payable.
6. You need to run an off-cycle payroll batch, and your payroll provider wants to charge you an additional fee.
7. Troubleshooting and fixing payroll issues takes more than an hour.
8. Employee information is being entered into more than one software application.
9. You have a growing need for an HR solution that is integrated with payroll to track time-off balances, fixed assets, effective dates on employee records and provide compliance reporting.
10. You missed a payroll tax filing because you weren’t notified, or it wasn’t accurate.
11. Employee complaints are increasing because they either can’t find their payroll and HR information themselves or they have to log into multiple applications.

What should I do?

Growing companies need payroll software that is flexible in its support of organisational structures and therefore helps companies understand payroll expenses in more depth including payroll by department or by location which can help improve planning.

Software with built-in role-based security and timesheets included means businesses won’t have to upgrade to another edition to protect and better control labour information. Intuitive payroll process including payroll variance views and reports can help prevent payroll pain before it occurs for the ultimate in accuracy control. And when the time comes to address your HR data, growing businesses need a unified system that can put all of their workforce information in a single place, fully unified with payroll and financials.  

NetSuite offers unified accounting and payroll that businesses simply won’t outgrow. Natively part of NetSuite, SuitePeople Payroll allows you to run weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly and monthly payrolls all in the same batch and won’t charge an extra fee for an off-cycle payroll.