Linda Artesani covers payroll basics for accountants: how to calculate hiring costs, guide employees through W-4s, and file Form 941. She walks through setting up payroll in QuickBooks, Gusto, ADP, and Guideline, and explains law firm benefits like 401(k)s.
Chapters
Hi there. Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. This week is all about payroll. And in the accompanying blog post, there's a lot of links back to places where you can do some calculations for clients, employees that may ask you, how do I know what to pick when I fill out a W-4 form? There's a link in there to help you figure out what it's going to cost, the exact cost for your client if he comes to you and says, hey, I— he or she comes to you and says, hey, I have this new employee I want to onboard, or I'm thinking about adding someone new to the staff. What's it going to cost me to have that new employee? So those are some of the tools that are linked into the blog article itself. A little, a little bit about what this article is. So this is completely just payroll. It's really not specific to attorneys. That will be next week. But it was mostly about understanding payroll and understanding the forms that go along with payroll. So you have the knowledge, especially if you're new and working with attorneys or just new as accounting or accountant or bookkeeper. Payroll can be intimidating. I can remember when I first started doing this work, I was afraid. I was afraid of processing the forms, and back then we had to do it by hand, was afraid of making a mistake. I didn't want to cost my client any money. So these are some of the things that wrapped around payroll that can give you a little bit of anxiety. And I was hoping that just by breaking down some of the forms, the form, the 941 form, and then also breaking down exactly what the costs are and what the different forms that you have to fill out for the attorneys— you still have to fill out the W-4 or have the have helped the attorney-client's employee fill out the form. So you need to be knowledgeable in what is exactly those aspects of payroll. That's basically what the article is about. It is a shorter article. Next week's a little bit more expansive, but I wanted to lay down that groundwork so you have some of the knowledge of the terms and what the forms mean. And hopefully it will help you a little bit in assisting you with maybe learning some of what happens around working on attorney books, whether it's salaried employee, an hourly employee, maybe learn a little bit about the fringe benefits, a little bit about 401s. 401s happen a lot with law firms. There's usually a good amount of benefits that go along with working at a law firm, and you kind of need to know, are they using Guideline? Perfect. It's part of QuickBooks or it's part of Gusto. Are they not using Guideline but they're using an outside source? You have to log into an outside website. Can't really show that because of the sensitive nature. It's typically pretty easy if you've got your payroll set up properly, that will be easy to do to bring that out to the outside website. But also, as you start to do this kind of work, it's helpful to know the inner workings so that you understand it. So when you do maybe onboard, QuickBooks is easy, it's right inside the program and it kind of self-onboards, although you should still know it because you need to know where that is in the books and how to get to those settings because it's not always done very well for you. You have to really make sure You pick the right bank account, you pick the right— by default, it'll take you to wages and it will take you to expense, payroll expense. It's very generic payroll tax, payroll expense. There's not a lot of breakdown and you really need to break it down. Your tax professional will love you if you do. So knowing that that's under the gear and it's under payroll settings, accountant settings, knowing how to put that in there and making sure that it's properly set up is really key to a successful payroll onboarding of a client. And you will know that a lot of these payroll services, you can reach right out directly to them. Gusto has a pretty good system. ADP does also. And there's a lot of things you can learn for working with your client right on these platforms. There's a lot of free materials that you can really log in. And there's a couple of link backs to ADP because I think ADP does a really great job with their Accountant Connect channel. So on that note, I hope you have a wonderful week and I hope you enjoy the article and we'll see you next week. We'll get a little bit deeper into the attorney side of payroll and some of the things that happen there. Thanks. Bye.
