As a small business owner, managing your own payroll may not always seem like a priority. Let’s face it: between juggling submission dates and figuring out what paperwork you need to fill out, payroll can be a chore that falls to the wayside. And it’s easy to see why, when so many businesses manage their payroll without following any payroll best practices.

Even if you’re doing your employees’ payroll as a solo job, best practices will help you keep track of submission requirements and deadlines without affecting how much you get done. Read on to discover nine payroll best practices you can start working on today to make your payroll process additional documents you keep for your personnel. Choosing a good storage system will also go a long way to keeping your records organized for the long-term.

Use Online Payroll Software

There’s no reason to fuss with traditional ways of organizing payroll when there’s easy-to-use, online payroll software available at the tips of your fingers. Instead of searching through filing cabinets to furnish important employee data every time a deadline rolls around, you can use powerful payroll software to make it easy to search through all your employees’ historical data and organize it the way you want.

What’s even better about powerful payroll software, and something that traditional payroll organization systems can’t offer, is flexibility and customization. No two businesses are alike, so it doesn’t make sense to settle for anything less than a solution that’s tailored to your needs. From help with taxes to HR compliance assistance, there are best small business payroll options to choose from.

However, you can own and automate your HR process with Swifta HR. click on the link www.swiftaerp.com to get started. amless. If you’re ready to streamline your payroll processing and make your payroll management more efficient, these nine best practices can make yhe process fast and easy. To simplify your payroll process:

Spend The Proper Amount On Payroll

Small business owners often worry that their cash flow will affect their payroll deadlines, and for good reason. If you don’t know how much of your revenue to put toward your payroll, an unhealthy cash flow could be disastrous. Setting aside the proper amount for payroll ahead of time will keep your system chugging along just fine without any cash flow-related hiccups.

One of the most critical payroll best practices is to make sure your business has a positive cash flow before estimating the amount of your gross revenue to put toward payroll expenses. Once you’ve adopted a few  strategies to increase your cash flow,  it will make much more sense to then go ahead and carve out a rough (while you’re starting out) percentage of funds you should be spending on payroll.

Set Payroll Notifications & Reminders

Keeping track of important payroll dates and deadlines is all well and good, but you’ll probably want to set up a system of notifications and reminders to make sure you don’t miss them as well. Companies have traditionally relied on physical calendars to keep track of tax deadlines and dates, but more and more businesses are now switching to cloud-based payroll solutions that sync up with important government submission dates and send them reminders automatically.

If you aren’t yet using software to help with deadline notifications, there are also plenty of calendar apps you can use to manually track dates. These calendar apps can sometimes be more beneficial for extremely small companies that only staff a few employees. Coordinate with your other employees and departments to settle on a notification and reminder solution that makes the most sense for your employees putting into consideration the size and scope of your business.

Create An HR Handbook

HR handbooks are a company’s standards, values, and ethical guidelines, put into words. As you may have guessed, these handbooks can be great ways to define your payroll processing procedures as well. Creating an HR handbook is one of the most effective methods of solidifying your payroll best practices and making it easier to follow them.

Try and get together with your HR and/or payroll managers to help you create an HR handbook. Your employees in HR and payroll can give you valuable insight into payroll best practices they already use themselves and can help you define answers for questions they frequently get in their day to day interactions with employees. Remember that your HR/payroll handbook should do a good job of answering frequently asked questions as well as defining your payroll best practices.

Have Organized Payroll Records

Keeping tidy, organized payroll records is essential for your own business records and taxes. First, you’ll want to settle on a storage solution to keep your records organized and in one place. There are multiple electronic payroll storage solutions that are easy to use and can be tailored to your business needs.

You also need to keep in mind which records you need to keep, and for how long. The IRS lets businesses know that most payroll records need to be kept handy for at least three years. For other, more sensitive payroll documents, like your employees’ retirement records, wage records, and tax information, there are different requirements for how long you need to keep them.

Organize your payroll system based on how many employees you staff, as well as how many a

Adapted from Merchant Maverick blog.