Doing your own business’s bookkeeping is common for small business owners who use a payroll accounting system. In some cases, you may decide to hand off the bookkeeping duties to one of your non-accountant employees. Unfortunately, non-accountants can make avoidable payroll mistakes even when they use a reliable payroll system. As a result, each company should take certain measures to help ensure the accuracy and timeliness of all accounting requirements.
Advanced Micro Solutions provides accessible, reasonably priced, and user-friendly software products for payroll accounting needs. Small businesses use our accounting and payroll software ($134) to set up their books and process “live” or after-the-fact payroll. If you want to improve your small business’s effectiveness at running payroll, consider the following accounting solutions.
Tips to Improve Your Payroll Accounting System
Make sure that your business records align with the reports that you send to the Internal Revenue Service each quarter. Some ways to ensure that include:
- Creating Accounting Efficiencies – Businesses make some of the most avoidable errors when they manually input company data. Save time for both yourself and your employees by fully utilizing your system to avoid inconsistent processing. Learn which accounting system tools can arrange which transactions. Remember that you will still need to set up payroll dates and payroll amounts.
- Understanding Payroll Filing Expectations – Using software to manage payroll will help streamline paying your company’s W-2 employees or independent contractors. But human error can still affect a reliable payroll accounting system. Business owners must file the right quarterly forms to the federal, state, and local authorities. That means that it’s important to know all of the relevant employment tax due dates and your business’s company classification.
- Looking For Any Negative Balances – Generate a balance sheet report for your business each month. This allows you to check for any payroll mistakes. You can also confirm whether you are zeroing out each month and, if not, notice any discrepancies.
Preventing Mistakes with AMS
Using payroll software to fix discrepancies retroactively is avoidable. Perhaps you miscalculated a figure on your quarterly reports. Maybe you unintentionally omitted some relevant form in your year-end submissions. Your business can avoid making these or any other mistakes by investing in a comprehensive payroll accounting system.
AMS’ payroll software has easy payer and employee setup. After getting set up with the W-2/1099 Forms Filer, you can use this add-on payroll module to automatically calculate your business’s federal, state, and local payroll taxes. AMS Payroll allows users to magnetically or electronically file nearly 30 state quarterly returns. Understanding your payroll filing requirements is also easier with AMS. Our system updates state and federal tax tables as you need them. It also provides Social Security Number verification files.
In the best-case scenario, your business won’t make payroll accounting errors. Nonetheless, even with a semi-automated system, some degree of human error does still exist. You will want to address these corrections before the IRS issues any major penalties. Learn more about AMS Payroll by trying a free 1099-etc Demo. If you have any questions about our products or services, call customer support at 405-340-0697.