How many hours a week are you or your office management employees touching finance, tax, timesheets, project tracking, and payroll? If you’re a small business doing things by hand, maybe software spreadsheets like Excel or G-Sheets (or by hand), you’ve probably felt capped by these tasks that have nothing to do with pulling in money for your business, yet they have to get done and your time spent here is time lost for the business. Well, thanks to technology – Time to think again.
I’m going to share with you the exact vendors that are hot hot hot in each of their fields and why I like them. Depending on the tier plan that best fits your business needs and your number of employees, typically these solutions are less expensive than the competition. In addition to cost consideration, users want an easy to use, but yet powerful interface as well as fast and helpful customer service. Most people aren’t finance majors or have experience, so it already is intimidating and I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be.
“Xero” Hassle Financial Software
Let me start with this – when it comes automating as much as possible and managing your business finance – ranging from reporting, sending quotes and invoices, receiving payments, connecting to your eCommerce website and all it’s plugins (such as UPS Shipping Label generation (to track as an expense, of course)) and recording payroll – Xero works well!
Xero offers more than double the number of available integrations, is developer friendly if you wanted to make your own and connect to their platform, has higher customer satisfaction, a better user interface, is 100% cloud based, and fair pricing, and can file local taxes (Intuit doesn’t).
Additionally, their customer service is great too, and one of the things I really, really like is that there’s no more waiting on hold like Intuit. Instead of calling them, they call you. Inside your portal you can request them to call you, 24/7.
I had mentioned that Xero catches mistakes that competitors don’t. A business I consult uses Xero, and they unknowingly entered an employee’s SSN wrong. While that usually is a big ouch, with Xero they caught the error come the second week of January that next year (preparing taxes) and we received an email that they were unable to verify this employee’s SSN with the SSA, and it had a link to prompt us to change it. This business started using Xero Q2 of 2020, and in the past quarter and years had used Intuit. The employee’s SSN was wrong there, too, and Intuit never caught it. We tried to contact their support, but they make you log in your site, click Help, and then dig through forums and hopefully you encounter a ‘Request a call back’ button – no matter what I searched I never did. So, I got no support! They had to file a W2c and W3c and correct that past tax years on their own, with no help from Intuit. Even if Xero hadn’t caught the SSN error, their support was easy to reach and they offered to help us file a W2c if it came to that anyway. It’s certainly not the goal of any business to make mistakes, but when they do, in the financial world, it is always a big pain, and having excellent Xero customer service on your side makes all the differents. Business owners don’t have the time to be full on CPA’s for their own business.
I think this last part will say a lot about the direction businesses and looking to: Xero supports importing your QuickBooks data and allows you to continue where you left off – Intuit offers no such thing. People just aren’t bailing from Xero, they’re migrating to it!
Paying Your Team With OnPay
Whether you want to use leverage your local CPA to run payroll or use an online payroll service such as Intuit, PayDay, ADP, or OnPay – this is a task you should not be doing by hand regardless of your plans to integrate it or not.
There’s just too much room for human error that affects tax documents and risks fines from the IRS, plus you have to commit to pay your team even if you are sick or work around vacations. With a payroll service, you can pay W2 employees and even 1099 contractors by paper check, having the service mail a check to them for a fee, or use direct deposit. Direct deposit is the most popular option out there and most small businesses fail to realize how easy it is. If you have one or two employees that don’t have bank accounts or want a check because they are going out of town and want to cash it along the way, you can do both. It’s not one way or the other.
OnPay is so easy to use and currently presents the most value of any service. I have real experience with them, too. Take my father’s landscaping business, whom I consult: He choose to ditch Intuit Payroll, tried Gusto for a while, and left them and started using OnPay. We considered our local CPA but since they charged per payroll (and we were weekly), it wasn’t a good fit and offered no integrations. We’ve said hello and goodbye to employees and dealt with the usual tax notices such as payment frequency schedule changes.
OnPay and most other payroll providers will even handle filing your local taxes, something that Quickbooks didn’t offer. It’s wonderful!
If you are curious and want to use the OnPay interface, just go to their website, and enter your name and email and click Join a Demo. Your first month is free, too. If you do like it and want to sign up, please let me know I can send you a referral invite.
To get started, you’ll need your business EIN number, employee and contractor bank account information, hire dates, and other standard personal information. If you decide mid-year or whenever to switch to a payroll provider, some require you to send them reports from your previous provider or allow you to get set up but upload your own payrolls later. With OnPay, they require it before you can run your first payroll. This strict policy ensures your taxes are going to be correct. Gusto, on the other hand, does not force you to upload them so you can forget and upload them too late. They say they take 30 days but my father’s business had a bad experience that took over 60 and it was never completed, hence why we switched off of Gusto.
Be a “Deputy” of Time Sheets
Most business owners are unfortunately unaware that they could get a lot more out of their financial software than just cutting down on time spent in spreadsheet software or pushing papers. There are so many integrations with other software and hardware solutions that can add features to allow your business to automate as much as possible. This allows you spend less time in the office in more time out on the floor or projects. While some integrations are not free, typically the reduced time spent on mundane tasks and virtually eliminating mistakes caused by human error that cost extra time are eliminated, and the business can take on more clients to fill the newly discovered free time.
An example? Time sheets. Skip the waste of paper, trying to read sloppy employee handwriting, and correcting their totals for the period. Are employees shorting themselves or adding to much time by mistake? Using a mobile app, such as Deputy, allows you to install on a tablet and mount on your office wall as a time clock, or invite all your employees to download the app on their phone to clock and break in/out. The nice part is that you can review all the timesheets from an app, too, approve, and it sends it over to your payroll provider if the integration exists. Let’s use OnPay, for example, the most popular and best value payroll provider I can think of. More on this later.