NOTE: make sure you get some accounting guidance here. It matters how you do this if you want to minimize taxes.
And on accounting guidance do you mean get advice on distributions vs wages?
Yeah I'd check with an accountant on the wage / distribution / benefits stuff. For small businesses though you really can just pay it all out, just make sure you're paying the taxes.
The Bank of America option is free if you are depositing directly to a BoA account. Being that both me and my business partner have BoA, this works for us.
The free version also allows you to file all the federal payroll tax forms, which is handy. It doesn't allow you to file the state payroll tax forms though, but if you live in NY (not sure about other states), you can do that all online directly through the states tax website.
You also need to remember to file with your state for unemployment insurance, which is a separate department from the tax department (at least in NY). And if you have other employees who aren't shareholders, you'll also need to register for workers comp insurance.
One trick I'll pass along -- with the disclaimer of talking to your accountant first -- is this:
If you need to minimize payroll costs, you can do some planning and pay yourself once per fiscal year, usually in Dec.
What you do is figure out what you think you need to make this year for a "reasonable salary" and pay that in one sum in Dec. The rest you can take as equity draws throughout the year, saving you the payroll processing expense each paycheck.
If you don't think you'll make enough to get a "reasonable salary", you can take your draws throughout the first 3 quarters, and then in the 4th quarter, try to have enough left in the back so that you pay yourself 1/2 of the total draws so far as payroll (Example: 18k yearly total > 12k over first 3 quarters, then final 6k through payroll in Q4).
This allows you to save some payroll processing costs, and make filing the forms easier -- it's just for one quarter, with the other 3 being zero-returns (which you still need to remember to do over the first 3 quarters).
But again, talk to your accountant.
Here's the online demo login:
https://www.thinkexponent.com/ e-mail: demo@demo.com password: demo
Payroll is located in the Accounting tab.
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We are also looking at ambrose (http://www.ambrosegroup.com/services/payroll_admin.html) to do both payroll and benefits administration for us soon.
www.harvestapp.com.
I'm very happy with it, I just wish it had an API so I could plug my timesheet system directly into it. Presently I have to transcribe from a web report into their interface but as we only have 16 employees total, it is not a big burden.
We evaluated ADP and they were much more expensive for our use case.
Yes, I should have used max(). I copied that expression out of my budget spreadsheet and I added that cell after we had 5 or more employees, apparently.
Scrape your web report, stuff the data somewhere (locally), then on their site, read your cached data and populate their forms.
Greasemonkey would probably work fine as you described, but I would be more comfortable with an actual API when committing funds.
Even with an API, I would probably still want to review the transaction on the web UI before committing.
Anyone who has a small team of engineers and does it themselves is insane. You'd gain more from staying in the programming zone for 5 minutes than you'd save in processing costs.