Donna Genie walks through payroll setup for campgrounds opening soon. If you're late to onboard, apply for tax accounts, pre-note your bank, and collect employee info fast. She recommends paying 75% of gross wages first, then reconciling after taxes are sorted. Plan at least two to three weeks ahead.
75% of gross wages.
At least two to three weeks.
Well, recently we've been helping a couple of new campgrounds get off the ground and open their doors to the public. So I want to take you on a few journeys and the obstacles that we face this week, helping them so that you can learn from them. I'm Donna Bordeaux with Campground Accounting. We are helping a campground who is opening. And one of the first questions that they had was, we need to run payroll this week because it's their first official week that they have closed and they have employees waiting for their payroll. Now, in this case, this campground just came on board with us. So we are still hot and heavy in the onboarding stages. So keep this in mind when you decide to work with someone, make sure that you have plenty of upfront lead time to come on board. We actually talked with them several months ago and they waited until fortnite much last minute to pull the trigger. So this has impacted a lot of what we can do for them. We still need time to set up the payroll. You have to apply for new withholding and unemployment accounts, have to get the payroll set up and pre note bank account, need to get the information from your employees so that you can properly pay them and withhold. So their first question to me was, well, if payroll isn't set up, what do we do this week so that we can pay our staff? My suggestion, if you're running behind the gun on this situation, is to pay some 75% of the gross wages. That will allow a buffer for Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes and any withholding needs to be made. And once your payroll is up and running, you can come back through and adjust that as if it was a temporary loan and run that actual payroll. Hopefully you've got enough there to cover the taxes and if not, you'll be able to recoup it on the next payroll. But if they were to go with their gut instinct and pay these people their gross pay, that would mean a tight ship on the next payroll because you're going to have double the withholdings you normally would on a payroll. So that may leave some employees with a little sting in their pocket. So make sure that you give yourself some advance lead time to set up payroll, at least two to three weeks. Some states are pretty slow with this, so you need the state squad operation as well. So leave yourself some lead time in setting up the payroll. If worse comes to worst, you can pay a portion of it as a temporary loan and true that up on the next payroll. So I hope that helps you guide through an issue that comes about as you're opening a new campground.
