Welcome to Particletree!

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, over 64% of businesses prefer to handle their own payroll. Like most small businesses, we prefer to handle our payroll and taxes in an effort to keep costs down. When starting our first business, learning how to pay ourselves and the government probably caused more stress than was necessary since we didn’t know where to start. So, when you start your business, or if you’re one of the 37% of companies that use no electronic payroll software, here’s some info on how we keep our costs and stress levels a little lower.

• Find an Accountant - Understanding the basics of accounting is probably a good idea, but handling taxes without consulting an accountant isn’t. You could probably learn about taxes by yourself, but it sure won’t be cost effective. In our case, a two hour session with a CPA explaining how to use QuickBooks, handle payroll, and pay basic taxes cost $150. For a small business, payroll and monthly/quarterly taxes are fairly repetitive, so once you know how they work once, you’re good to go. You’ll still probably have to go back to the accountant at the end of the year, but at least you’ll be able to handle the day to day stuff with confidence.

• QuickBooks & QuickBooks Payroll - If you were to manually handle payroll, you’d have to write checks, record what employees are paid, calculate what you owe, fill out state unemployment tax forms, federal unemployment tax forms, quarterly reports, and whatever other type of taxes you have to pay. With QuickBooks, paying employees is as easy as clicking a button once they’re in the system. With employee information and what they’ve been paid on record, QuickBooks can easily create and populate the necessary forms required to pay taxes. All you really need to do is print the forms and mail them to Uncle Sam.