Having an effective payroll for churches means your organization can successfully complete payroll without needing experience or a lot of time to complete forms. Payroll is an important aspect of a church’s operation which often can be complicated with employee classifications. A quality payroll software helps clarify the payroll reporting process and ensures you complete payroll on time to avoid any penalty charges. A software is most efficient when you can customize it to your needs. AMS takes a modular approach to our payroll services, meaning you pay only for the services you need. We will explain how our church payroll service can help streamline your organization’s payroll process and let you try a free demo.
Managing Payroll for Churches
Correctly completing payroll for any church employees can be an overwhelming task for someone with no experience in payroll. The IRS has specific filing requirements for ministers and other clergy members. Since some work functions qualify a person as an employee and some qualify a person as a self-employed contractor, it is important to understand how the IRS collects taxes from each type of employee.
When you set up payroll for church employees, you need to determine if SECA or FICA taxes apply. These taxes are for Social Security and Medicare. It is often the case that members of clergy perform services both for the church they are a part of as an employee and for individual members of the church as a self-employed clergy member. This dual income means that only the income the church pays the clergy member is subject to FICA taxes. For any other income a clergy member makes, they must file self-employment taxes.
Completing payroll for members of clergy is not always intuitive and can cause headaches if you do not have assistance from a CFA or a quality tax software. Payroll for churches faces the same consequences for inaccurate filing or late submissions as any other business. To avoid a stressful payroll experience, churches should consider the investment of tax software.
How AMS Makes Church Payroll Easier
AMS has a payroll solution for churches in our Payroll Software. We understand that churches often have limited resources both in terms of budget and people to put toward their payroll process. For this reason, our modular approach means that you can build your ideal payroll and tax filing software to suit your specialized needs without paying for functions you do not need.
Even payroll novices will be able to use our intuitive, menu-driven platform and avoid payroll frustrations. Payroll for churches requires individual payee files to accommodate the different classifications of employees. Our software features simple data importing and automatically saves new payee files, so you will never have to enter the information for a clergy member more than once.
Before you make a decision to invest in our payroll software, we encourage you to call our Sales and Information team at (800) 536-1099 to answer any questions you may have. You can also sign up for a free software demo to try our services out for yourself. If you need additional support, check out any of our other software tools, like our 1099 and W2 forms filer.