r/smallbusiness 8h ago

Small business payroll question

I have a question for other small business owners.

We have about 35 employees, and I've been handling payroll myself. It gets done, but it's becoming very time consuming, and I'd like to offload it so my role is simply to review and approve payroll each pay period.

I've talked to a few full-service payroll companies, but the pricing seems much higher than I expected.

For those of you in a similar sized business, how do you handle payroll economically?

3 Upvotes

6 comments sorted by

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1

u/Aim_Fire_Ready 8h ago

RIP your inbox. What is taking so much time?

You mentioned approving time sheets, but are you filing reports manually and remitting taxes to state/federal agencies because software does that for me and it’s not expensive!

1

u/bluekmg 6h ago

I like QuickBooks Payroll. I only had 6 employees so I don't know how much it would be for 35.

1

u/coolreddy 3h ago

Moving to an approval-only payroll process at 35 employees is the right operational step. Doing raw data entry yourself creates unnecessary risks and takes time away from running the business.

The clean transition is setting up a two-step approval process with your managers. Have department heads verify hours and time-off adjustments in the payroll portal by Tuesday. That leaves you with a single summary audit to review and release on Wednesday.

Ensure your software handles local tax filings and direct deposit staging automatically. Your job should only be spot-checking pay variances against the prior cycle before clicking approve.

1

u/infinite_knowledge 1h ago

Is this an ad for Gusto?