Keeping tracks of hours, union wages, social security, & workers comp can be difficult. Let specific construction payroll software help.
If you run a remodeling or construction company with employees, you know that those employees are an essential element of your business. How else would you get client jobs completed for clients in a timely and high-quality manner? But let me ask you this: Are your employees costing you more than they are benefiting you?
After your construction payroll, union wages, Social Security & unemployment taxes, workers compensation, and benefits, every employee should be contributing more to your company than they cost.
But how do you check this out? The most effective way is to use QuickBooks’ construction payroll software features to assign labor costs out to jobs.
Managing Your Construction Payroll
You may think you can save money by manually entering and managing your payroll, but in the short run, this isn’t a very good use of your time. And in the long run you risk making errors and missing out on critical information that offers the potential of increasing profits.
By using QuickBooks as your construction payroll software, however, the majority of the basic payroll work (taxes, deductions, government tax forms, etc.) can be handled in the background for you. In addition, the powerful nature of these construction payroll software features allows you to assign compensation and payroll taxes to individual jobs. In addition, Info Plus Accounting has created a product that shows you how to calculate and automatically add in related ‘labor burden’ costs. This means that you’ll be able to see true job cost results while simultaneously processing an accurate payroll. This provides information that’s critical for your budgeting, estimating, and pricing.
So what exactly can you do with construction payroll software?
- Create and print paychecks or (even better!) choose to set up ‘direct deposit’ into employees’ checking or savings accounts.
- Assign compensation to different accounts in your Profit & Loss reports based on whether payroll is for direct, indirect, or administrative employees. (This means that you’ll receive more meaningful management reports.)
- Compute and post accurate employee and employer payroll taxes based current Federal, State, and local tax tables. (Believe me, you don’t want to make mistakes in this area – penalties are severe and time-consuming to correct!)
- Assign compensation and employer taxes to jobs and tasks based on employee time reports.
- Allocate payroll burden to jobs and tasks performed.
- Set up individual employee contributions and deductions.
- Track sick and vacation time earned and used.
- Pay payroll liabilities and create tax forms yourself, or choose an option to have this process handled totally by Intuit Payroll Services.
- Create a wide variety of reports that will be useful for management purposes (for example estimated vs. actual time spent on jobs, reports for union reporting or workers’ comp audits, etc.)
What’s Left for You To Do?
While construction payroll software will make your life easier and help your business succeed, there is still a little bit of work left for you or your administrative assistant.
First of all, you need to choose a construction payroll software program that will easily integrate results into your cost-accounting system. You’ll want to use an accurate and highly flexible software program, such as the one integrated with QuickBooks and Enterprise, so that you can customize it to precisely reflect and benefit your business.
Once you’ve chosen your payroll program, you’ll need to learn how to set it up to track the details that you (or others) need to see for your business. This can be extensive, depending on your needs, but once it’s done, your construction payroll software will pay you back tenfold.
Some of the things to keep in mind are:
- What types of employees do you employ, and where do you want their costs to appear on your reports?
- Who needs access to payroll-related information? And who should NOT be able to see payroll information? (FYI: QuickBooks allows you to limit who can see confidential payroll information.)
- What types of information do you need to be able to track, and/or extract for outside agencies such as unions, workers’ comp, certified payroll reports, etc.?
Once you have the construction payroll software set up and ready to go, decide what type of time-collection system you want to utilize (a topic that we’ll need to address in a separate article!). Then allow QuickBooks to do the rest of the work for you.
Want to Learn More About How To Set Up Your Construction Payroll Software?
BuildYourNumbers.com offers workshops and training for all types of small-business software, including payroll software. Sign up today to learn how to implement this for your business. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
Customer Praise For Diane Gilson, Info Plus Accounting, and BuildYourNumbers.com
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ From the Intuit FindAProAdvisor website:
“We have used Diane for years whenever we have had trouble with our QuickBooks, or whenever I needed training in QuickBooks. Diane knows this software probably better then the back of her hand! In fact we started calling her our QuickBooks Guru! The other day I ran into a problem in QuickBooks where my guys labor wasn’t showing up in the job reports, I tried everything to figure it out. I spent almost 4 hours on the phone with QuickBooks Payroll. I was so frustrated I scheduled an appointment with Diane. Diane was able to help me figure out what was going on in 12 minutes!!! I highly recommend Info Plus Accounting!”
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