As a small business owner, it is up to you to make sure that your employees are classified properly and that your employee payroll taxes are properly calculated and paid on time. Set up an appointment with your accountant to make sure that all of your employees are classified and paid properly, and make sure that you are also budgeting and paying your payroll taxes on time.

Check Your Classifications for Your Employees

The first thing that you need to do is check your classifications for your employees. You should do this at least once or twice a year. Look at the duties and responsibilities of your employees to determine if they should be classified as independent contractors or employees. If you expect an individual to do the services that your business offers, and meet standards set by your business, that generally means that they are an employee.

Once you check and make sure that you have all of your employees classified properly as employees and not independent contractors, you need to look and see if you have employees properly classified as salary or hourly. There are actually rules that determine if workers are salary or hourly. It can be helpful to sit down with an account who understand all the nuances between salary and hourly employees to review the job descriptions of your employees to make sure that their roles are classified correctly as hourly or salary, and to make sure that you are paying them correctly for overtime.

Budget for Payroll Taxes

Sit down and take a look at your budget. When you create your budget, do you only budget for payroll or do you also budget for payroll taxes? If you do not currently budget for payroll taxes, be sure to adjust your budget so that it reflects not just your employees' wages but the payroll taxes you need to pay for each employee.

Once you make that change to your budget, then you want to set up your payroll process so that your state and federal payroll taxes are automatically paid for you. You never want to get behind on paying your state and federal payroll taxes, because the fines are extremely steep.

Automate Your Payroll

Finally, work with an accountant to automate your payroll process. Set up payroll software that you can use to input important payroll information, and hire an accountant to process all of your payroll information each pay period. This will help automate the process and make things run much smoother for your small business.

Make an appointment with an accountant and make sure that all of your employees are classified correctly, budget for payroll taxes, automate the payroll tax process, and set up a digital system with your accountant for accomplishing payroll.