 zero accounting software payroll overview get ready to be an office hero with zero support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need then can be done on a YouTube page we also include added resources such as Excel practice problems PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable so once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it here we are in our custom zero home page scrolling in a bit holding down control scrolling up on the mouse wheel currently at 175 percent zoom in opening the demo file but doing so with the reset button so we're gonna reset the data and open at the same time then we're gonna open a couple more tabs to put our reports in as we have been doing in the past noting I've got some other tabs open that we're gonna go to shortly so that's but this is the tab we're working in right now I'm gonna right click on it duplicate it right click on the duplicate a tab duplicate it again tab to the left accounting let's open the balance sheet report tab to the right accounting let's open the profit and loss or income statement back to the tab to the left and let's change the date bringing it up as has been our custom to 2022 and update that information hold on a second it didn't do it it didn't do it I told you to go to 2022 I got to check this one off there we go okay so now let's go back to the first tab where the data would typically be put in the data in we're now looking at the payroll process note that the demo version doesn't have a lot of payroll information in it in part I would assume because the payroll is going to be an add-on type of feature as it is with most accounting software in other words you typically have to pay more for the feature of payroll if you want to process payroll within the accounting system and also because payroll is something that you have to kind of update all the time it has to be really run real-time oftentimes which is difficult to keep updated in a demo file so what we're gonna do here is just talk about the general payroll options you would want to think about as the business owner and as a bookkeeper and then in the second half of the course we'll think about looking at a few payroll transactions in a bit more detail and possibly turn on I think there's a free trial version of the payroll so we might test that out in the second half of the course we'll just go over the options at this time so zero like most accounting software has the option of adding on the payroll so if I go on to the zero website and I look at their their different plans here all the plans have the option of processing the payroll on down below as you can see here we got the payroll with gusto from $40 per month so you can take a look at that option in more detail now that's going to be similar to many different types of accounting software because payroll more and more has become kind of a specialty field in and of itself do in part to taxes and the tax laws really complicate things and in payroll that's usually one area that gets quite complicated with different tax laws and the tax laws could differ in different locations so then the question is well what are going to be our payroll options now the first option would be what if I don't have any employees if you don't have any employees then of course you don't need to be turning on the payroll you might then plan and say well what if I gain employees in the future then you want to know what your options might be if you were to grow and you wanted to have employees in the future and you could turn on gusto at that point in time possibly or you can go to a third party and process the payroll outside of the zero systems that's the second option so if you have payroll that's one of the first things you want to be thinking about do you want to be processing the payroll within the accounting software paying more for the features in order to do so or do you want to have like a third party processing the payroll that's outside of the accounting software and then just entered the information into the system to make the financial statements correct so outside providers the large ones are things like an ADP and paychecks now I'm not promoting either of them those are just some of the larger payroll providers there's many of them out there but the point being that whatever system you want to use you really want to get your payroll set up right from the start payroll is one of those things where it's better typically to use the adage of measure twice cut once try to get it right the first time as opposed to a tinkering type of method until you get something right because the tinkering or fixing mistakes on the payroll can be quite costly and you're most likely to run into like legal problems like getting sued unfortunately with say employees so you'd like to get it set up properly the first time so let's think just think about the process and why the payroll has become kind of a specialty field in many areas in and of itself and that'll give us some more information in terms of our choice as to which method we would like to use to set up payroll just know to set up if you have these the drop down here and you can also go into the payroll power by gusto here if you want to turn on the payroll but let's just talk about the reasons the rationals right we're gonna go to a flow chart and this is just a flow chart to show us the process of payroll so typically what will happen when you when you're processing payroll well you're gonna have to if you're doing it within the accounting system you're gonna have to set everything up set up your custom set up your employees similar to customers and vendors set up your payroll options and everything and then of course you'll simply process the payroll which will be kind of like a check form right when we process the payroll it'll be similar to us basically writing a check because we're gonna assume on its most basic level if we eliminate everything else like withholdings for example it would be a decrease to the checking account and the other side would go to an expense typically we would process the payroll we'd get a choice as to how often we want to process it typically weekly semi-weekly bi-weekly I'm sorry weekly semi-monthly bi-weekly or monthly or something like that and then we would be processing the payroll according to that schedule which in essence would result in a check going to our employees and again if there was no taxes payroll would be just like another kind of vendor transaction I paid the utility bill I paid the phone bill and I paid the payroll bill right I just wrote a check to my employees or had an electronic transfer it decreased the checking account and the other side went to payroll expense unfortunately it's not that easy most of the time because payroll comes along with it a lot of regulations depending on where you are at in part those regulations being due to taxes right so now in the United States we have an income tax so we have withholdings and so you also might have benefits or something like that meaning the employers is going to be paying for stuff out of the paycheck before you get the paycheck some of those things might be mandatory such as like in the United States the withholdings for income tax social security and Medicare some of them might be voluntary such as putting money into a retirement plan or health care or something like that but that of course greatly complicates our our system because now we're not just writing a check we have to process the payroll we have to determine for each of our employees how much they need to be withheld from them for both the required withholdings and for their voluntary withholdings and then we have to take that out of the check we have to track the fact that we took that out of the track because we don't get to keep that money even though we didn't give it to the employees we've got to give it to whoever we owe it to on the employees behalf in essence the IRS treating us the business owners as their tax collectors right they've made us into their tax collectors so we collect the money from the employees and then we have to track it and pay it up to the government similarly with withholdings for like a 401k plan we got to withhold it and then pay it to like a 401k plan or something like that now not only that but we also have to make sure that we tell that to the employees so now that we're not just giving them a check if we were just giving them a check we're like yeah you earned $500 here's $500 that went into your bank account here's how many hours you worked that would be quite easy to calculate that but now we got to tell them well no this is how much you earned but then we took from you withholdings for federal income tax social security Medicare health care we got to show you what we took out of your paycheck and then show you the net check so we could show the reconciliation of what you earned to what actually got deposited in your bank account and not only do we have to do that for each paycheck but we also have to do that for each for each for the year to date information so you can see this is starting to get quite complex if not for any individual calculation but for all the calculations put together quite complex so then on top of that we're gonna have to do the reporting requirements in the United States we have quarterly reports which are 941s yearly reports which are 940s and then W2 reporting and W3 reporting and so so there's a lot of other reports that against software can be quite helpful with so when we pay the liabilities that means we're now we're paying the government if it's withholdings for income tax and then if we're paying the the the voluntary to the health care providers and so on so you can see with all the reporting that's that's in there it gets quite complex and that's just from an accounting standpoint we also have a lot of laws that are they go into place in terms of human resources you might call it human resources and payroll kind of go together a lot so so from our perspective we're focusing on just like the logistics generally of how am I gonna get the accounting right so that I can get my filing requirements but there might be there's other kind of requirements that could be HR that might be tied to but not directly to the to to the reporting requirements so hopefully if we turn on the software it'll help guide us through all that kind of stuff so that we can help process it but even then it's still somewhat complex and you and that's why you might say well maybe I'll just go to a third-party provider if you were to go to a third-party provider then they would they would hopefully handle all that human resources stuff and make sure that you're in compliance with the law and make sure that you're they're giving the coupon stubs and whatnot to the employees and everything and then when you enter the information into our system in zero we just need to enter the information to make our financial statements correct I don't need all the other detail I don't need to be I don't need to report all these reports that are gonna gonna show the breakout on a on a employee by employee paycheck by paycheck kind of thing because that kind of information will be done by the third-party what we need is to take that information done by the third-party and enter what's necessary to make the financial statements correct and there's various ways that we could we could do that but and we'll talk more about them mainly in the second half of the course but just want to show those options now if you're a small if you're a bookkeeper then you want to think about what's your default method for new clients you want to be picking up right you want to be saying I want a system that I could standardize so you might say for example what industry do I want to be specializing in and then of course with payroll the question is do I want to be dealing with customers that have payroll or maybe with small customers that don't have payroll like sole proprietors if I'm dealing with people with payroll then I want to think about how am I do I want to process the payroll do I want to process the payroll as a general rule within the zero system and bill for it taking into consideration the added costs of payroll and whatnot and and adding that into my process or maybe you can find a payroll provider that you can work with closely possibly you know it doesn't have to be these two there's a bunch of payroll providers and add them into your accounting system so you're like okay now I've got my network I'm gonna do the accounting in zero possibly with the use of bank feeds trying to automate as much as possible that I can I'm gonna outsource the payroll to a third party so they can take care of all all the resources there on it and I'm going to implement into our system just what is needed to get the financial statements correct and the third party is going to be doing all the other stuff so when you make a pitch of doing bookkeeping to a new company you want to know where you stand with your general process with payroll do you want and then you want to know where to draw the line to if they say I don't want a third-party provider and that's your system then you got to say well maybe I have to let them go if I don't want to do payroll rule myself within zero right you get you got to say which clients you're going to be wanting to be picking up and and you're gonna have to be selective on that to some degree so don't get over your head and and drive yourself crazy on it so that's the general idea with the payroll again in the second half of the course will at least enter some transactions related to payroll and if we can get a 30-day trial maybe we'll turn on the payroll at that time but we would like to keep the practice problem in such a format that that you could do it with a limited cost and follow along with it so we'll dive more into that in a future presentation