What is payroll accounting? Payroll journal entry guide

payroll administration services

Her work has appeared in publications such as Quartz, the Village Voice, Gothamist, and Slate. Jeff is a writer, founder, and small business expert that focuses on educating founders on the ins and outs of running their business. Payroll management is one of the most important administrative functions of your entire organization.

Why trust QuickBooks for payroll?

payroll administration services

It is also great for small businesses without in-house payroll or HR departments. A liability is an amount you owe, while an expense is an amount you’ve already paid. That accrued vs. deferred revenue means anything recorded as a payroll liability can become a payroll expense after you run payroll and disperse the money. You pay unemployment taxes, both federal and state (if applicable), separately from the taxes shown in Journal 2 and Journal 3. When all deductions are subtracted from the gross wages, the result is the employee’s net or take home pay.

It also comes with access to medical insurance, dental and vision insurance and HSA/FSA accounts. Regardless of the plan you choose, you’ll want to make sure you evaluate all of the features you need and ensure the service can meet them. Below you’ll find a chart of the starting price and range of the top-rated payroll services.

  1. The best payroll services for small businesses offer automated payroll and calculations, tax filing support, an employee portal and an intuitive interface at an affordable cost.
  2. These services save time, reduce risk of error (which can become very costly) and automate processes such as tracking employee PTO.
  3. Below you’ll find a chart of the starting price and range of the top-rated payroll services.

What are the benefits of payroll software?

Whether you provide training through your human resources department or you have a third party train your team, it’s crucial that there is a training process. Everyone should use the same procedures and processes to make payroll as effective accrual accounting prepayments as possible. The largest benefit of manual processing is the cost, as you don’t have to buy any software or pay someone else to run payroll. However, if you calculate what your own time is worth and how long it takes to process payroll, you may find that you aren’t saving money.

The purpose of payroll accounting is to keep track of employee compensation and related payroll costs. Recording these costs can give small business owners an accurate picture of their expenses. You may find that hiring an accountant or bookkeeper to record these transactions can help you spend more time working on your business. Through time sheets or time and attendance software, employers must accurately track the hours worked by non-exempt employees each workweek to correctly calculate pay.

Our Experience

Detailed analytics are also offered in color-coded pie and bar charts for a straightforward interpretation of data. When I clicked on an element of the pie chart, a screen popped up to show more granular data regarding the broader data point represented in enrolled agent vs cpa the graph. Once payroll is submitted, you receive an email confirmation to confirm a completed payroll run.

Best for Seasonal Businesses

However, they do not like that the platform experiences frequent reporting glitches and they wish it offered more integration options. The most basic plan offers payroll tools, while subsequent plans offer more in-depth HR tools. You can do so by clicking “get pricing” on the RUN by ADP pricing page and filling out the questionnaire as prompted.

If you can squeeze some “good to have” features as well, do so but don’t overextend yourself. In my experience, setting up automations was as intuitive as possible, given the large ripple effect each automation produces. I had to first set up people groups within the platform, including their permission levels and other specifications.


Bryon Howard, RE/MAX House of Real Estate
20, 2439 54 Ave SW, Calgary, Alberta, T3E 1M4
Tel: 403-287-3880 (Re/Max) or 403-475-7368 (office) Fax: 403-287-3876 or 403-276-8049 (office)
The data included on this website is deemed to be reliable, but is not guaranteed to be accurate by the Calgary Real Estate Board
MLS® MLS REALTOR® Realtor
Trademarks used under license from CREA