Our Canadian co-op is getting ready to run our first payroll! Any suggestions from hard lessons learned? Any and all feedback welcome, especially about mistakes
Yes, anything is technically possible, but strong opinions are welcome!
What schedule have you learned works for you? Weekly? Biweekly? Monthly? Why?
How would you do it if starting again?
Do you use any payroll services or addons? Would you start with them?
Is the burden of running payroll high enough to warrant doing monthly?
How many people on your payroll?
(We have 7 members, but only 2 are expecting to pull regular paychecks in the medium future, the rest are more part-time, including working other FT jobs. We mostly track work and intend to bill mostly by the hour, with a percent skim for the collective fund. We’ve set up Quickbooks Online and are 99% committed to it.)
Heard today from @clayton on weekly show & tell call that agaric.coop runs monthly payroll, auto-pay from bank. No special platforms/services for HR/payroll. Just Gnucash. Just to share
I do think monthly paid is a good set-up. In the coop I used to work we had a HR-alike worker who managed the administrative tasks of our payroll. We paid each worker each month. I think it is the best since that way each worker can manage their money according to their monthly needs. That might be practical since, many bills tend to be due on a monthly basis.
Small update: we decided against using QuickBooks payroll due to frustration with QuickBooks. We went with Wagepoint, which is what powers QuickBooks behind the scenes in Canada. We’ve only had an onboarding call, not yet run a payroll, but it seems really great, with most Canadian filings happening automatically
We admittedly learned about Rise People after we’d made our decision, which is somehow FREE (<20 ppl) to run unlimited payrolls, including on-demand, and they file automatically. They apparently see payroll as the lure into their larger HR/benefits management system. Anyhow, though this is region specific, just thought y’all might like to know that this is the lay of the land on HR software right now
