Well, I Can’t do a Root Canal…
The other day a dentist came to meet with me regarding a payroll issue. He was visibly upset with himself and said he felt stupid for messing it up. My natural response was “Well, I can’t do a Root canal.” I caught myself off guard with this at first, I did not necessarily mean to say that out loud. As my wife has said before, my think-to-talk ratio is incredibly small. Luckily, this client laughed and responded with “that’s not something you should try without training.” So many times ‘untrained’ self-employed business owners try to save money by doing their own payroll or accounting and all too often it ends up costing them in the long run.
Payroll can be especially tricky. Getting payments made and forms filed on time seem to be a common issue for people doing it themselves. The problem with this is if a form is a day late it carries a 10% penalty. if a payment is late it carries a penalty and interest. Payroll can also be very time consuming. There are still people who calculate their employee wages by hand utilizing federal and state withholding tables. Payroll does not have to be a daunting or time-consuming issue. There are many ways to streamline a company’s payroll. Simply by utilizing software employee’s wages can be calculated in seconds and on the pay-date the money can be direct-deposited into the employee’s account. Software also allows the timely and accurate filing of tax payments and forms. No penalties, no late nights calculating payroll checks, no fussing over making sure forms are accurate.
Bookkeeping. Did you just shudder? Does that word remind you of hours on end cramming a bunch of data into an excel spreadsheet to keep your CPA happy come tax time? Well, it shouldn’t. Bookkeeping is a necessary evil for all businesses, large or small. Any CPA will tell you the only way to truly measure how your company is doing is to look at the financials. What are financials, you ask. The profit and loss, balance sheet and statement of cash flows should be common reading material around the home of a sole proprietor. There are several good solutions for this, and you will not have to look far to receive adequate training or someone willing to provide you the service at a nominal charge. Find the solution that works for you and get rolling. But be careful, you don’t want to end up doing 12 months of data entry on April 12th. The biggest problem with putting all the data entry off until the end of the year is that your tax professional doesn’t have any accurate or reliable data to look at throughout the year to come up with any tax planning opportunities for you. This could end up costing you thousands in taxes.
While payroll and data entry can be taught, why not hire someone who specializes in those tasks? If you would like to talk about how I could be of help to you with these tasks, please reach out to me. All the free time you would come across would allow you more time to focus on what you are good at.
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