 And welcome, we are so thrilled to have you here joining us today on your Monday, or as I like to refer to it, a Monday, because Friday gets all the fun, right, a Friday, and we need to celebrate Monday's. So Chris Posey, I hope you're here to celebrate a Monday with us. Again, for those of you watching and listening, we have Chris Posey joining us. Chris serves as the business development manager with PayEntry, and he's here to shed some light on payroll services for your non-profit. So stay with us, but before we dive into the conversation, we want to remind you who you're looking at or listening to. So hello to you, Julia, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, thank you for creating this platform of conversation, allowing me, Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group to be of service each and every day, again, as we have these conversations that impact our nonprofit sector. So really thrilled to be here and also thrilled to have the ongoing support from many of our presenting sponsors. So huge shout out of gratitude goes to our friends over at Bloomerang, American Non-Profit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Non-Profit Thought Leader, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, non-profit nerd, and non-profit tech talk. I will see many of them in New Orleans for the AFP conference coming up, but again, so much gratitude to these companies that have been with us, many from the very beginning, allowing us these conversations like the ones that we're about to embark on with Chris. But before we do, we also want to remind you where you can find all of our previous episodes going back to March of 2020. So you can find the broadcast on many streaming platforms, which include Roku, YouTube, Demio, Fire TV, podcast, pretty much anywhere you can stream a podcast, you can find us. So go ahead and ask for the non-profit show. And then also, if you haven't heard yet, we shared last week, you can download the app and I have my app downloaded on my iPhone and it alerts me every single day of the new upload and I absolutely appreciate seeing that. So even when I was gone last week, I was getting a notification of the new upload. So that's really cool to see. So yes, check us out on all of these platforms. And again, Chris, we are so glad to have you here again. Chris Posey, Business Development Manager at PayEntry. Welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here, honored. Thank you so much. Yeah, tell us a little bit, Chris. Start us off. What is PayEntry? What are the services provided and how do you provide services to the non-profit sector? Give us a little bit of an insight. Yeah, so we were founded in 1994 and we licensed our software out. So we were a technology company. And so we worked with people that wanted to provide payroll services but not actually have to develop that software on the back end. So for about 25 years, we watched the market and we learned how people were running their businesses and how in-clients were being treated. And so we kind of sat back and said, OK, let's make this list of everything that we hate about payroll and let's fix it. So we wanted to go back into it and say, hey, we're going to go direct market with our own product. And we wanted to provide much better customer service, right? No more 1-800 numbers, direct contacts for everybody. If you need help, you have a direct phone number, direct email. We wanted to include everything from hire to retire. All kind of covered in under one bubble. And we wanted to have a real simple, predictable, and transparent pricing structure for our clients. So there's no surprises, no hidden fees that pop up and makes budgeting a little bit more effective and easy for our clients in that way. Sure. It's such an interesting thing because payroll has been at the bane of the existence for so many nonprofits and that gets wrapped into other departments that don't necessarily, they're not necessarily the best at managing this. And so it's going to be really interesting to have this concept. And I guess I want to start off with what is payroll processing and what is it not, right? I mean, we're looking at our sector trying to keep people. And a lot of this involves with additional hours or bonuses or whatever the hack, I've got to believe that if you don't have a payroll system that can function that way or think that way, you're going to have some problems. Yeah, absolutely. Being able to plan and budget and hire and retain talent is a challenge for a lot of businesses and a lot of different organizations. So payroll as a whole, I decided to look it up one day. I was really curious. So I guess thousands of years ago or whatever before there was like cash being exchanged, people would get paid in goods. So maybe you worked for somebody for a day and they paid them in a couple bags of rice or clothing or whatever. So obviously that's changed throughout the years. And here we are now more modern day payroll processing, which is just paying your employees for the work that they do. But it is more than just that, right? You have to calculate those total wages earned. You have to do the proper withholding deductions. You have to file those payroll taxes and you have to figure out how you're going to deliver that payment and offload some of that liability from you. Because if you're trying to file your own taxes, if you're trying to pay your people, you know, that's a lot of liability that gets dumped onto your plate when you can outsource that to other people and not have to worry about it. I appreciate that. One thing that scares the daylights out of me is the IRS. You ever want to get a call or a note from them? Right. And no one wants to get a knock. And so I really appreciate this. And I know that, you know, through so many of the changing landscapes of the last three years, the payroll services and what needs to be included, not included, what's allowed, what's not allowed. What can you pay? What can you not pay with this funding? That's a lot of moving pieces. Yeah, absolutely. And having having a system in place that like our tax team is very proactive. So they're always staying in front of of challenges. They're always doing the research, they're always staying, you know, in front of not only federal, but state and local. I mean, there's some areas where you have local IDs or tax brackets where, you know, your neighbor could have a completely different tax bracket than you based on the school system that they're in. So it's it's hard for employers to stay on top of that. Right. So that's not your job. That's not what you're supposed to be doing. You want to focus on what you do best and how you're providing services to your your people or your target audience. So let somebody else handle that for you so you can focus on what you do best. Yes. So if we if we want to do this and this is something that we say, OK, Chris, I'm interested, what should we look at for budgeting purposes? What are the costs associated, you know, with having a payroll service? Can you talk to us about that? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of different things that you want to consider when you're when you're talking to a potential partner, when it comes to payroll, you want to think about whether they own their own product or not. You know, are they licensing it out to other people? What's their support look like? What's their implementation look like? How comfortable are you with technology? Is that team going to be training you on that product? If you are having challenges, how accessible is somebody to be able to teach you about that or help you with these challenges? If you get a notice from the IRS or the state government, what, you know, what are they doing to help support you in that manner? So there's a lot of different things that you want to think about. Are they helping you with your your tax filings? Are they charging you for their nine forty one tax filings? Are they charging you for the end of your filings? Are they charging you for W twos? So you really want to factor all of that into your your consideration when you are having these conversations. Because, yeah, you know what? There are some payroll companies out there that have really pretty UIs, but that doesn't mean anything. User interfaces. Sorry. If that doesn't that doesn't mean anything if if you don't know what they're charging you for or if you're getting the support that you deserve. Hopefully that makes sense. It does. And it's very grand. So let's back it up. Are you talking about for nonprofits that have 50 or 100 more employees? Like, what does that look like? Because this is one of those things with 1.8 million registered nonprofits in this country. The bulk of them don't meet those those levels of employees. So how do you work with the small? We work with small as much as we work with large. You know, I I was working with a nonprofit here locally. Recently, he's just the one employee and that's fine. You know, we will absolutely work with a solo person. And, you know, just to kind of get that process started. And his plan is to start growing over the next couple of years and hiring people on starting in 2024. And because he has access to that hiring and onboarding software, now he could start posting job descriptions. He can get those applications coming into the system. He can track them more effectively. He can interview directly through that system. He can onboard digitally directly through the system. And, you know what? It it makes his life a lot easier to be able to to find and retain that talent as well. Yeah, now that's amazing. And it also provides that segregation of duties, right? So that's not, you know, as a one person organization making their own payroll, you know, for for that. Talk to us, if you would, Chris, about outsourcing this. So, you know, you talked to us about the cost. So we're considering outsourcing. How does that compare to what the process is for us to do internally? So outsourcing versus in-house processing. What are the big difference differences here? Yeah, really good question. And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head, right? It's it's being able to kind of compartmentalize that a little bit through technology, right? So now you don't have a stack of paperwork that you have people to fill out and then retain. And then you have to put it in a filing cabinet and then you have to pay for storage somewhere because you have all these hard files of things. And being able to digitize that and offload it in a very secure environment is going to be very important. Right? When you're thinking about in-house processing, you have to think about that zoom back out, right? And look at the bigger picture. How am I getting job descriptions out to the job boards? How am I getting these applications in? Am I reading them one by one? Am I, you know, manually trying to enter their information into a system somewhere or whatever spreadsheets I might have? Am I am I keeping time through an Excel spreadsheet? You know, how am I entering all that information? And then how am I paying them through my accounting software? How am I remitting those taxes? How am I filing those taxes? You know, versus, you know, outsourcing where you have a partner who's going to be able to be doing that for you. So it takes just an enormous amount of effort off your off of your plate. And really for the the the cost that can be involved with that, it's nominal considering what time savings that you're going to be getting. You know, Chris, one of the things and you touched on this briefly, but I want to circle back to this. We're seeing so many of our nonprofits, just like we are for profits, hiring people from different parts of the country or people that actually might have moved during the pandemic to work remotely. And that looks like that's moving forward. How is that playing in? Because we have so many different rules and regulations depending upon where we are located, you know, state to state. Is that something that you all are seeing as well as a big change in the industry? Absolutely, one hundred percent. You know, employers are adjusting this concept of a remote workplace, right? I have one client who has 54 employees in 15 different states. So it's it's a lot. It's a lot to stay on top of, right? I mean, that's that's a lot, right? I mean, you're not researching each one of these states every month or every quarter or every year to find out what changes have happened as far as their tax laws are concerned. And then, of course, you have to file in all those different states and you have to have your state unemployment tax and your state withholding taxes and, you know, some other states have other things that you need to consider. And again, it's it's not what their job should be. That should be our job, right? We're staying on top of that and we're doing it for you. And because we don't charge for those multiple filings in the various states, that can save organizations enormous amounts of money in the long run. A lot of a lot of providers do charge for those individual states. Not to mention the stress and pressure. One of the service lines I offer, as you know, Julia, is interim executive work and sometimes, depending on the organization, I am in charge of payroll. And it is so stressful to me because that is someone's like livelihood, you know? I will say, you don't there's two things you never mess with people on. And that's one, their money and two, their food and to just, you know, and it's right there in a paycheck, both of those things are right there in a paycheck. Yeah. Yeah. And you want to make sure that gets out effectively, quickly, without fuss, because, you know, first thing Friday morning, if their paycheck came in wrong on Thursday night, you know, you're getting a phone call and it's not going to be a happy phone call. So you want to make sure that that's done quickly and and and easily. But if if something is wrong, you want to make sure that it's it's resolved quickly to gosh, I had one client who had somebody who put in their social security number wrong and at the end of the year, they had to pay to have it fixed. It was like three thousand dollars to have it fixed. And it's just why, you know, but, you know, and then they had to go back and fix all the W twos and it was a it was a long process. It took them months to figure it out. I can't imagine. Let me ask you this question. You know, listening as a nonprofit, because we have such, you know, such a bandwidth across the nation, even international, what is the timeline that it takes to engage with pay entry? Like if we say this is something we want to now move from in-house and we want to engage with you, what is that timeline of setup look like? That's a really, really good question. You know, a lot of organizations will take anywhere between six weeks to six months. We've streamlined our process to be anywhere between two to four weeks, depending on the size of the organization. And we also don't charge for any kind of implementation. So it's yeah, it's a much smoother transition. It's it's a I mean, again, we've really streamlined that process. We talk a lot about our MPS score. Are you familiar with the MPS scores? So it's net promoter score. It's it's basically just kind of a quick snapshot of what your your clients think about your product, how likely they are to recommend you, things like that. And it's a scale of negative one hundred to zero to positive one hundred. And the payroll industry as a whole is somewhere between negative nine and negative 14. So it's not really like a looked upon well industry, right? So with some of these other organizations get to zero, they're having a party. That's a great day for them, right? It's baseline. They baseline. Yeah, we're there. Cool. Our rolling MPS score for the year is seventy two. So our clients love us for many, many, many different reasons. Yeah. So we have a lot of questions for you. And I want to get into asking, having your you help us to if you would interview somebody like getting the questions. But before we do that, one of the things that Jared and I have noticed, especially in within some parts of the nonprofit sector, is this day pay kind of situation. And this has to do with maybe organizations that are programs heavy, maybe for a small period of time, or it's they don't need like super high skilled labor, but they need some type of, you know, on site labor. Are you seeing that come about more, you know, as we move through this pandemic period? Yeah, you know, we're we're actually working with the company right now to to do more instant pay concepts, because some people do like that, you know, but we don't charge per payroll. So if you if you did need to pay somebody a little bit more quickly, you can do that. But yeah, there's a lot more of these other organizations that are popping up to offer things like instant pay, right? So you work, you work your eight hours, you get paid at the end hours, or or it's it's it's an option to where they would have almost like a and I may be saying this wrong. And you know, I'm sure I am, but there might be a way to some of these organizations have a way to to be able to have like a visa card where they can pull their funds right away, you know. So it just kind of depends on what the organization is trying to do. But yeah, we're starting to see that instant pay pop up a little bit more kind of more in the gig economy, not so much in the in the like more traditional business sense. But yeah, we are seeing it come up more often. Well, along those lines, I mean, I know that a lot of our viewers are going to be thinking, wow, maybe we should be thinking about this. So help us to kind of figure out what are some of these questions that we should be asking a provider and so that we we kind of can make the best decision that we need to make as we're navigating for some of us a pretty significant change in management. Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's a funny I just spoke about this over the weekend that at a business seminar, kind of similar questions, right? Because it's a lot more than just your paychecks. Going back to what I was saying earlier, you want to think about a handful of things when you are interviewing a potential provider or a partner is what's that client advocacy look like? Are you getting somebody that you're going to be able to reach out to directly when you have those kind of challenges? What is the average response time? Is it a general email support versus a direct contact? What's that? Is it bare bones support? Or do you have something a little bit more robust? Are they helping you with compliance? Are they providing any sort of HR services and or support? What's that training process look like? Are you working with a single person? Are you working with a team? You know, what's all included with it? Is hiring and onboarding included? Is garnishments included? Is applicant tracking included? You know, are there offer letters in the system? What's that onboarding process look like? Is it digital or is it paper? And, you know, if you are more than 50 employees, are you subjected to that ACA reporting? And is somebody helping you with that? Is there an online integration to your QuickBooks online or your other accounting systems? You know, and then I think the thing that I like to stress, too, is what's that pricing look like? If they can't give you a quote right then and there for what they're going to charge and they need to put together a bunch of numbers with without knowing what all those hidden fees are. You know, that's questions, too. Are there any other charges outside of this? I know I just kind of threw a lot out. Yeah, but no, but I think that kind of helps us understand the ecosystem because it seems to me and Jared, I don't know what you think about this, but for a lot of nonprofits, this is kind of going to be one of those movements that maybe they hadn't planned on. But because of the pandemic and being more comfortable with contracting different parts of business, I mean, it seems like maybe the sector is going to be a little bit more open to looking at this. Yeah, I I do think so. And I'm curious, Chris, you know, who holds the relationship within the organization? Is this accounting if we have HR? Is it HR? Like, who owns that relationship within the company? That's a really good question as well. Question. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously, there's going to be some agreements that need to be signed, POAs for the states. So whoever the the authorized signers for the account would sign off on those. But then it kind of depends on the organization structure. So if if HR as a whole is managing human resources and the payroll aspect of it, you can make certain people, certain contacts on on different things, right? But typically, we can add multiple users into our system. So it just kind of depends on what their process looks like. I know that's kind of a vague question or answer, but it really just kind of it depends really, you know, but you can put in multiple different people into the system and and have and because you'd have a dedicated client advocate, they'd be able to reach out to that one person to be able to get the answers that they need. Now, one thing you shared with us before I went live, you know, was really about how you can serve different verticals, different sized organizations. And I think that's really important to share because as we know, as we become comfortable with our representative and the person that we've built rapport with, you know, talk to us about how that relationship could change, maybe it doesn't change. But what should we expect by way of like a committed relationship if we chose to outsource the service? Someone that you can go to for all questions revolving around human resources and payroll, right? Like you want to be able to get those answers as quickly as possible. And so the way that we've kind of developed our system where you have a dedicated client advocate that you can reach out to if you have questions or needs or emergencies, they're going to have a direct backup and then that backup is going to have a pot of people that they can reach out to. So there's always going to be somebody that you're going to reach that's familiar with your account. So you, am I answering your question correctly? Yeah, no, you definitely are. And then I love that you had shared that at pay entry, you can help anyone, right? And so if we're at 49 employees and we hire our fiftieth one, it's not, you know, that they're going to get passed off to someone else. But some are going to, you know, some companies might. Yeah, I get what you're saying. Yes, because we can work with me personally. I work with anybody, anywhere, any size of organization. You know, I like I was saying earlier, I just on boarded that that one gentleman who's who's the only employee for that nonprofit. And then our largest client is 13,000 employees. So, you know, it just kind of depends again. I mean, we can work with anybody, anywhere, any size. It's not a problem at all. Yeah. And I think that's thank you for sharing that. I think that's really important because, as Julia mentioned, so many nonprofits are considered small businesses, you know, and really the statistic is 85% of all registered nonprofits in the US are operating at under one million dollars. So the chances of being a smaller organization with smaller, you know, employees, I think is, you know, that's that's the game we're in right now. And I think it's a two, it's a vastly underserved area. Right. There's there's a lot of people out there, especially in the small business sector, that don't really get the attention that they deserve because they are small businesses. And in our opinion, every business deserves the attention and the support that they need because we want them to be successful, right? Small businesses are the backbone of the United States. And if if they're successful, then we're all going to be successful. Yeah, they make up our communities, right? Like there's so many, so many small businesses. This is just fascinating to me. And, you know, I really appreciate learning about this this opportunity, the service line, because as you mentioned, Julia, there are so many ways that our workforce is taking shape, you know, and what to consider. And again, the last thing I want is the IRS knocking at my door. Well, and to kind of circle back to that, too, it's with the way that the workforce has evolved since COVID, now you can hire extremely competent and amazing people in other states to help you with whatever you're doing, right? You're not really leashed to your territory or your area anymore to have people come into the office. It's it's just vastly changing. So now you can post those jobs throughout all 50 states if it's obviously something that they can do remotely, right? But now you have a much larger talent pool that you're able to pull from. Yeah, I think it's I think that's why this is such an interesting conversation today, because we are seeing a different type of workforce and a workforce that wants to be engaged in the nonprofit sector, but they might not be in our community and our region, you know, anywhere where we normally would have found that talent pool. And so this has been really interesting. Hey, Chris Posey, business development manager at PayEntry. PayEntry.com. Check them out. It's really, I think, an amazing tool that any nonprofit is they're looking to maybe level up a little bit and understand how working outside the normal parameters that we're used to can really improve your nonprofit. So, Chris, it's been a lot of fun to hear what you have to say. And wow, things are changing so much. You know, Jared, think about it. We would have never had this type of conversation. No, three years ago when we started, because the ecosystem of how we pay our employees and what they're looking for is changing. It's not it's changed. It's changing. I mean, we're in this this period of change right now. So it's been really, really interesting, Chris, to have you be a part of that. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, been joined today by my my personal nonprofit nerd, Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we want to extend our amazing shout out that we like to do at the beginning and the end of every show to Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Nerd and Nonprofit Tech Talk. These are the folks that are with us day in and day out. A quick shout out, Jared, will be in New Orleans with the AFP conference. I believe, Jared, and I don't want to be spilling the beans, but you're going to kick it off with the CEO of AFP, right? Absolutely, yes. Mike Geiger will be there to to launch us on day one for the episode. So we'll still say 930 Pacific, so no need to adjust your calendars. And you will be broadcasting from the Blumerang booth. Yes, I will be holding down the fort in our studio here in Phoenix. But it's going to be really fun. So make sure you look for that Blumerang booth and then filter by and introduce yourself to Jared Ransom, the nonprofit nerd. And who knows, maybe she'll even pull you on camera. That's right. There's always an opportunity. So thank you. It could be a lot of fun. Hey, everybody, we like to end every episode with our favorite mantra. And that is to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone.