Your employees are counting on their payroll check and they want it on-time and accurate every time. By Gary Shotton #000176

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Payroll Checks

By Gary Shotton

Hello, my name is Gary Shotton and I’m here to talk to you about Inspiring Better Business and I hope these videos and audios are helpful to you, we really want to see you prosper and be successful in your financial realm especially as business owners. Today I’m going to talk about the subject of payroll checks and the importance of certain things you must do and say and specifically for things that you don’t want to do regarding payroll checks to your employees, now you got to start off with the fact that most of your Employees probably if you’re like mine and most people, even in the United States are pretty well living paycheck to paycheck so that payroll check coming in on time there’s pressures in their household they’re anticipating certain bills to be paid and so there’s a little bit of pressure on each worker to be sure they bring home the bread, as we say bring home the money spouses are involved in and bills needs to be paid so there’s some pressure on those individuals. Then certainly you as owner or manager or key employee responsible for payroll you have a lot of pressures I mean there’s more things than just making payroll work and we’re going to talk about creating good systems to be sure that works well but you know you have pressures but you’ve got to make sure in one way or another payroll is something that rises to a very high level of importance in your mind and in your company, so you signed up for the job to be the owner or the manager and if this comes with the territory people need their payroll checks and they need them on time. Now I list four don’ts and I hope these are all things that could be helpful because in most cases and you’ll hear about my stories I have either came close to or failed in some of these areas and I said don’t do this.

Number one don’t be late; you see we try to create a payroll system so that it would be on time every time. In my 35 years of business ownership I can probably only think of just a few times that were might have been a couple hours late in other words payroll checks normally come out at two o’clock, this is in my previous business but now they’re coming out and it was four hours late or two hours late we got it out the same day but it was late and was a computer problem was a computer glitch and we could explain it away but not very often don’t be late don’t be consistently late. I  like to tell the story of my friends in Poland this as many years ago and it was a real deal because I knew unemployment was pretty high in Poland and my friends sons were in the early 20s and they were working at a TV stations, they were great guys and doing a good job I’m sure and I got to mention to the dad who was my friend; I said, you know I have a lot of pressure making sure that payrolls paid on time the same day every week, on that case it was every other week and he made a comment said are you kidding me, my sons one of them has not been paid for six months and I’m thinking what are you talking about, well the system there was such that they were not a lot of jobs and so you’re either on the employed list or the unemployed list, and there’s so many people unemployed that if you just got a job you were content for the paycheck to be late not just a day late not just a week late but in this case months late doesn’t make sense to me but that’s how they operated and when the company got some money to come in and then they would finally make up back pay, you know one time. I was close to that my company, and I just lined everybody up to the companies that listened the day I cannot make payroll on the same day other than a technical issue you need to go find a job someplace else and if you want to work here we’ll call it a hobby you must get your payroll check and you as owners must be responsible for that variant.

Number two; don’t make mistakes. You know there’s nothing more irritating than the payroll to be wrong, first of all it causes a cycle a system and a process to correct the payroll okay it was wrong so next week we’ll correct it now the next week’s payroll has a lot of extra scrutiny a lot of extra observation to make sure that’s right and maybe you don’t get it right even the second week on that one mistake this could bleed into three weeks of confusion so do everything you can to be sure your pay is correct every time, For 35 years we have a process of presenting the projected number of hours most of our workers work on an hourly clock they’re paid by the hours and we give them a system so we give them that here’s what we have ready to pay you on the Friday paycheck but we try to give it to them on Monday and Tuesday and they must get back and confirm that this is right this helps us correct any mistakes, sure there can be mistakes but the mistake is that it gets all the way into the check don’t make mistakes that creates a system, a process and a way of doing things that you know that it’s going to be systematically done, we tried and now it wasn’t always this case because a mistake or things like the power goes out, computers go down we always try to have our pay processed and ready the day at least one day before we actually send it out in other words if paydays on Friday we have to try to have it done on Wednesday evening that way if something is wrong we can work Wednesday evening we can work Thursday we can get it right and still make payroll right. Now we do more and more what’s called ACH automatic cash sending whatever that stands for in other words it’s depart deposited right to the people’s checking accounts and we don’t actually write a check but on probably three of our 60 people that we actually write a check the rest is deposited into their bank account it’s a lot better for everyone and so that’s a system so their systems check it check, check it and recheck see if that your systems working.

Don’t add clutter; that’s number three don’t add clutter on to your payroll check there’s things like you may be paying somebody mileage for using their vehicle or in my case I had a system made up so I had a way of charging back some claims when I had this previous business and it cost me, I had to go to court I had to prove that I wasn’t stealing from my workers because I cluttered up the payroll check, keep it as clean as you can don’t add unnecessary things like driving allowance just make another check that way payroll is payroll other things is other things yeah we do have a tool bill and we allow a deduction that they sign for by the way you don’t want to deduct anything from someone’s paycheck unless do you have their signature authorizing that they fully understand that they have agreed to have this pay deducted for instance we might give a personal loan we don’t like to but we do and at that point may it let’s make it up and say it’s $300 and we say okay here’s our agreement for the next 10 paychecks you’re going to pay us back out of your paycheck 30 dollars sign here now it’s clear it’s not cluttered number and the last thing is very important is don’t forget at least in our society and our culture that when you collect what’s called the payroll taxes the estimated tax federal and state tax amount that each person is to be withheld from their check we’re responsible to withhold that we’re responsible to send that in to the what we call the Internal Revenue system and we are responsible in our size of company to send it in or right away in other words we have pay on Friday we send that money to the federal authorities on Friday not a week from Friday not a month from Friday on the same Friday there’s rules, that allows you a little bit of latitude if you just go one or two employees but we pray we don’t hold that money for any reason if you want to be sure and get in very hot a lot of trouble with the authorities, let’s just say it that way start withholding that money and certainly never paying it in is almost automatically proved that you have stolen money from those employees because you’re taking their money how did their pay and sending it into their account with the feds and states in our nation. I hope this is helpful we’re here to help you we hope that you realize that there’s many aspects of owning a business there’s many parts of being successful and there’s some of this is just plain old drudgery just plain old nuts and bolts getting payroll right is one of those things you got to do it, you don’t have an option well it wish you the best we hope do we be Inspiring Better Business thank you.