Enhancing Employee Benefits: Payroll Services Explained as an Advisor

Hi there, Linda Artosani from the Accountants Law Lab. This week we're gonna talk about payroll as an advisory service. So I'm sure since you've been following me, you know that you want to uplevel your practice and start working with law firms and attorneys specializing, niching down to stay relevant in the future. With all of the advances to technology, it's probably a very bright thing to do. Now, that being said, you're gonna be allowed to do this whole other host of things to do as the bookkeeper or the accountant of record, because you're gonna have a lot of automation, and you're gonna have time to be able to uplevel your practice to get paid more and really use your brain to help your client. And one of the easiest places to add advisory to is payroll. I mean, payroll is definitely a service that you are going to be expected to know a lot about with your client as well as it's just a vital aspect of the services that just shouldn't be overlooked as services that we provide to our clients on a day-to-day basis or on a basis of what payroll service. How many times have you heard that question? What payroll service should I use? In my opinion, that even with the larger firms, you can use QuickBooks Online Payroll. It's right inside the product. And you can use it to your benefit if you put them in the Elite level. So if you're working with the larger firms, which I highly recommend, even the smaller firms, it's an easy sell to get the clients to buy into this product that if they use Elite, they're gonna have that payroll protection. So any errors in the file, they'll pay the tax penalties and any interest if there's a mistake on their part with the tax service. Typically, they don't have many tax errors, but sometimes it happens, and they will cover it. I've seen this happen with some of my clients. Where along the way over the years something will not be paid on a timely basis. The client gets hit with a fee, we pay the fee, Intuit reimburses us. So that Elite Payroll does cover that, but it's got so much more inside. We can't be the be-all end-all knowledgeable all for every state in the union, for every tax that's due to be paid. It's just not possible to be that person. Even when it comes down to workers' comp, you can get your workers' comp paid through that whole portal and you can, because contractors also in that tab when you open up the payroll section. And you can have that ability to pay your contractor, get the W-9 information. It might already be on file because you're using Intuit and they've got a lot of deep data inside there. And then you can also get your workers' comp insurance right through that product. And then it's pay as you go. So you pay that little bit per payroll, which is wonderful. Another thing about this payroll is you can use the benefit specialist that you get. Highest tier service is gonna get you that benefit specialist. So you're gonna get the benefit specialist that's gonna help you, which I've got a really great story in the article attached here that tells a story about this person that I worked with, that she was a bookkeeper, and she actually shined for her client because the client was losing staff members, and she jumped in and did this service of figuring out what's the benchmarks? What are the other firms in the area charging or giving to their staff for benefits? How can we outshine the other local people and win these top— and win top talent by providing more or better services to the client, to her law firm clients' team staff? So she went through, and in the story I'll tell you how she went about getting the information out of the employees to see what they wanted and how she researched to find benchmarks. These are all things we can do. This is advisory, folks. This is not your typical data entry, what you think of a bookkeeper doing, right? This is the stuff we want to do as an advisor. And I think sometimes it gets lost in the fact, or we're not getting paid for this service, right? So either we give it, give away the store and just assume that this is part of our bookkeeping package, which it is not. This is a higher level. It can be part of your bookkeeping package if you include it in your resources in your contract that you will do this work. If you put it in there, you will have it in your contract, then you do the service, you're already being paid for it. So that's something to note. And I can get into that a little bit more maybe in a subsequent article about how to get paid for these services. But you wanna align the payroll records. You wanna make sure that they're correct. So if you're moving somebody off of, let's just for example, say paychecks, and moving them into QuickBooks Online Payroll, you get in touch with the elite, the elite specialist who will be assigned to you. You sign up for it and then you can actually migrate that over from Paychex. You give them access to the reports, you upload the reports, they do the work in the background. You don't even have to do that back work. They put that work in for you so that you now have tied that service out with, you know, you're not gonna have two payroll services in one year. So you're gonna have one payroll service and Intuit is gonna back, in all the details from the other payroll provider. Couple tips you should note, which aren't in the article, but I think are important. If you're going to make a change in payroll services, do it at the end of a quarter. Let one payroll service finish the quarter and pay the taxes, and then the other one, and pay the taxes and prepare the tax return, like a second quarter mark, third quarter mark. Don't do it in the middle of the month. Don't, it's just not a good idea. End of the year is obviously the best and most logical time. Then you don't have to do all that back work to tie it in.. But sometimes it just makes sense. You might save your client money if they come off of— I've seen a lot of my clients come to me with these smaller types of payroll companies that don't integrate at all into QuickBooks. And I get them off of that and into QuickBooks. It just makes so much sense. You work with that Elite Payroll team, you work right in product. They've got a chat session in there. They'll call you, they'll get it going, they'll answer any questions. Yeah. They're fantastic. I have to tell you, I just moved somebody off of outside QuickBooks Online Payroll into QuickBooks Online Payroll that was in their file. The client's happy, the— I'm happy because I don't have two files with the same name. So it really makes sense. So I've got some tips in the article that I think are really valuable to read. So this is a good one to read the story about how my colleague bookkeeper figured out how to help her client. Stay relevant and get better, more talented staff to stay working. It's really expensive if you have to change staff all the time. It's a very expensive thing to do. If you've got someone working in your firm and you really like them, you might wanna really sit down with the client and do this work for them to figure out what's the best way to have them navigate the waters of, of employee benefits, PTO, vacation, their handbook. Mm-hmm. You'll get an HR specialist with a lead. So there's so much information here, but I hope this little bit of a video will help you. And if you want to learn more, join our group, the Accountants Law Lab. We talk about these topics and more, or join our Facebook group. It's free and I share a lot of articles there. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now. Bye.