Payroll Processing in Office Small Business Accounting
It was Ben Franklin who once stated words to the effect that “….in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes”. As most small business owners have realized, the moment they incorporate and hire employees, they immediately become liable for a number of payroll taxes to various government agencies at a federal, state and municipal level. As a result, one of the most complex tasks a small business inherits is keeping abreast of all changes in taxation rates, codes and rules. As frequently as every 45 days they have to update their systems to ensure compliance with the ever changing rules and regulations. A key design tenet for SBA was to un-tether the small businesses from the pressures and complexities of managing these constant changes. In order to provide the best and most comprehensive payroll processing capability to our end customers, we decided to design an architecture that enabled direct and real time updates to the tax tables and rules engine without requiring the business owners to worry about the administration of this cumbersome task. The abilities of the SBA .NET web services architecture enabled this innovation and made this a reality for our customers. We also did not want to reinvent the wheel and decided to partner with the most experienced and knowledgeable company in the industry to provide the processing engine, filing operations and support to our customers. This led to one of the most comprehensive and deep evaluations our team has ever undertaken to select the very best partner for our customers. The choice narrowed down very quickly and after a year of search we finally signed a formal contract with Automatic Data Processing (ADP) in 2003 to be our strategic partner for payroll services. A few factoids on ADP :
- ADP was founded in 1949 and is a pioneer in payroll processing in the United States with 57 years in the industry
- ADP serves over 50M employees worldwide, including over 25 percent of all American workers, with a combination of payroll, benefits, and other standalone services
- ADP processes and ensures timely payroll distribution to 1-in-6 private sector workers in the U.S. and approximately 32 million people in 26 countries worldwide
- ADP collects and moves approximately $900 billion in tax, direct deposit and related funds for its clients
The two companies have been working together closely since 2003, dedicating hundreds of software and domain experts to building and maintaining the payroll engine for SBA. I am super proud of this effort which has resulted in the most comprehensive and full functional payroll feature set for small businesses. There are two versions of the service (requires subscription):
- ADP Payroll for SBA ($169/year) provides Gross to Net calculation for the payroll run, enables printing of local paychecks, enables direct deposit to employee’s banks and provides rich reporting. The service also includes workers’ comp tracking, bonus checks, worksheets for local tax forms, print, signature-ready-forms for state and federal. Furthermore there are options to adds e-filing and e-payment for federal and CA payroll tax forms
- ADP Total Payroll (custom quote per customer) is a fully outsourced solution providing all payroll services including tax filing and money movement services to the small business. ADP takes full liability for this, provides unlimited service and support and essentially works on behalf of the small business. The service also includes capability for the printing of local checks as an option.
There is nothing really in the market that compares with these services either in feature richness or in pricing and we are super excited to set the new gold standard for our customers in this space. And of course we are not content resting on our laurels and are continuing to innovate to further add even more benefits in our next release. Stay tuned for an upcoming preview of the new features in just a few weeks.
