Harris KhanYou have a restaurant. You have employees. And maybe you have staffing issues.
If you do, you’re not alone – 30% of restaurant owners claim staffing as one of their main pain points. On top of that, 24% of employees will look for another job after just one payroll mistake.
From recruiting and hiring to onboarding and retention, employee management is a large umbrella. And within that umbrella, there’s payroll – and communicating your restaurant payroll processes and policies to your new employees.
Once you hire someone, helping each employee understand the fundamentals of compensation and workplace compliance is crucial to the onboarding process.
To start, employees should know if they’re:
- Being paid hourly or receiving a salary
- Classified as full-time or part-time
- Subject rules and regulations related to tipped wages
Despite the employee, there’s a lot to consider when talking about payroll. We’re going to break it down step-by-step.
Step 1: Deciding how to pay your employees
Whether you’re fully staffed or half-full, you have a ton of decisions to make when it comes to how you’re paying your employees – from getting paid in cash to receiving money straight-to-bank.
If you can, consider offering some type of incentive for employees to stick around. But don’t spend big bucks if you’re just starting out and you’re not sure what to expect.
In fact, starting out is a great time to give your employees a bit of a beefy bonus for trial and error. There are four primary methods to pay your employees:
- Hourly
Oftentimes, restaurants will pay an hourly wage to their employees.
In practice, hourly means you will be paid for the amount of hours you work.
For example: If you work 30 hours in a week, you will receive pay for 30 hours.
- Salary
Other employees are given a salary. This means that even if you don’t work as much as you should, you’ll still be paid your set hourly amount.
For example: If you work 25 hours in a week, you would still receive a salary for 30 hours.
- Bonus
Bonuses are often tied to your work performance – or, as we’re going to be discussing, employee performance.
For example, you might get a $100 bonus for every 100 hours of work you log at your restaurant.
- Commission
This is a neat way to earn money and is offered by many restaurants.
For example: You work 40 hours at your restaurant in a given week. You’d receive a commission of $200 for that week.
Step 2: Understanding your employee status
You’ve trained your new employees well. They’re ready to start planning for their first wages.
U.S. labor law and regulation requires that every employee is easily classified as one of the following:
- Full-time (eligible for employee benefits)
- Part-time
- Seasonal
- Statutory employee (similar to a professional exemption)
- Independent contractor
- Non-employee (detailed below)
Make it clear in your employee handbook and business operations manual how you pay each type of employee.
Step 3: Job Categories
Depending on how you classify your employees under Step 2, you need to determine what they’ll be making in wages.
There are three major categories for pay:
- Straight-Time Rates of Pay
When employees don’t work during an entire work period, they are eligible for straight-time pay – or the amount of money they are guaranteed to make if they work a set number hours in a work period.
Example: You’re a part-time employee. You work 24 hours in a week and you are eligible for pay for 24 hours.
- Overtime Pay
U.S. labor law requires that employees earn 1.5 time their regular pay for every hour worked over 40 hours in a work period.
Example: You’re a part-time employee. You work 50 hours in a week and you are eligible for pay for 50 hours.
- Discretionary Bonuses
Bonuses are paid out at the discretion of your employer. There are many types of bonuses, such as incentive, performance-based, and production.
The problem with this is that employees cannot legally claim a right to their earned bonus money.
Example: Performance-based bonuses are often paid out based on sales performance. If you’ve been making excellent sales in your restaurant, you might receive a $100 bonus – at the discretion of your employer.
Step 4: Ensure your employee is covered by your Business-Related Insurance
If you provide benefits to your employees, it is your responsibility to indicate on their paystub the amount of total wages paid.
The amount of wages reported on a paystub is also reported to the Social Security Administration. This is the only way a business can ensure its employees are covered by insurance.
Step 5: Communicating Wages to Employees
It’s your responsibility to communicate your restaurant payroll processes and policies to your new employees. Figure out the time and method in which you want to communicate your wages to your workers. This could be:
- Posting a list of hours worked
- Providing a copy of the employee handbook
- Emailing the employee handbook
- Providing a breakdown of their wages each pay period
- Using tools such as a digital handbook, payroll software, or third-party payroll service
Making payroll easy and fun for your employees doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money. Use lean processes, such as online payroll software, and you’ll save money – and the time it takes to manage employee payroll.
Benefits of Payroll software for Restaurants
Payroll software has the following benefits:
- Ease of use from when you first start to enjoy real-time information presented in a user-friendly fashion.
- Flexibility to add new employees, change their rates of pay, and keep up with their time in and out.
- Easy to export your payroll data, which will make running payroll less costly.
- Simple to reduce the payroll cost and fees by avoiding costly mistakes.
- Allow you to immediately retrieve any payroll information according to your needs.
- Making the most of payroll software involves building a payroll process that complements your unique needs.
- Easily shared across multiple employees, making payroll information accessible when it is needed.
- It saves effort as it instantly extracts payroll data from daily transactions and informs you automatically.
- Accurate, standardized payroll information decreases payroll costs and increases employee productivity.
- You don’t need to accept third-party payroll products and services.
- Automated payroll reduces the possibility of human error.
- An accurate automated payroll system results in a better employee experience.
- Payroll software solutions variously help you make sense of complex payroll data.
- Eliminates the potential for errors in employee payroll hours.
- You can be sure to reduce payroll errors as a result of software’s standardization.
- Records everything automatically, even real-time updates of pay slips.
- Offers the most innovative tools for payroll.
- You can easily find payroll errors and mistakes.
- Payroll software provides payroll support remotely as well as at your premises.
- Your HR team can easily monitor payroll transactions.
- Errors and mistakes are avoided in calculating overtime and regular wages.
- Using payroll software helps you avoid litigation.
- Frees you from time-consuming paperwork related to payroll services’ manual processes.
- The benefit of time with you freed from the tedious and time-consuming task of managing payroll.
- Payroll reports with utmost accuracy and precision.
- Enables attractive and professional reports.
- It is easier for you to manage payroll data.
- Payroll software is ideal for small businesses.
- Helps you achieve payroll efficiency and cost savings.
- Increases your efficiency when it comes to payroll.
- It enhances the effectiveness of your payroll operations.
- Payroll software also simplifies your business processes within HR.
- Eliminates payroll errors to prevent your company from losing business.
- Payroll automation makes payroll easier as you only have to track hours.
- Improves employee satisfaction as they feel valued and wanted by employers.
- Makes payroll information relevant and timely.
- Your company enjoys convenient, real-time access to payroll software.
- Fees are reduced as payroll processes are made easier.
- It’s vital that you know the right platform to use.
Outsourcing Your Payroll By Using Payroll Services
Lookup for a reputable payroll service provider who will take care of every detail involved in doling out pay checks to your employees. Payroll processing can be a hassle when you are in no mood to do it. Payroll services can simplify your payroll needs by searching for a professional payroll service provider for large and small businesses.
Although, payroll services can be quite costly, by outsourcing payroll you can be assured that all the needs of doling out payrolls are met and answered accordingly. A payroll service provider can handle more than just payroll processing. You don’t need to worry about changing rates of compensation and other benefits of your employees because a payroll service will handle it for you.
Payroll services will even handle taxes and other payments on your behalf. Payroll providers are for businesses of all sizes and necessities. A payroll service will take care of the tedious payroll processing tasks which can take up so much of your time and effort.
Taxes and other payments of your employees can be managed by a payroll service. Payroll services have updated information about tax processes and laws which will greatly benefit your business. You can be assured that payroll services will not run into any problems when it comes to tax payments or other payments because they are well-versed with the processes.
By outsourcing payroll to a payroll service, they take care of everything. Payroll services like payroll tax services will take care of everything you need to do. Payroll providers can also transfer data from one computer network to another. They know which computers and software are compatible with payroll processing.
Payroll services are very diverse and they have been around for a long time. Payroll tax services are a lifesaver for businesses. With the vast knowledge they have as payroll professionals, they will surely help your business save more money and help you save time and energy.
Payroll processing has always been a tedious task for employers and businesses. Payroll services are the best way of successfully handling this tedious task. You have better things to do than to handle tedious tasks such as determining payroll amounts and other tedious work.
It’s in your best interest to outsource payroll. Employing a wise payroll processing service saves large amounts of time and money for your business. Payroll tax services are the solution to the problems you are already facing to save you time and cost. Payroll services handle tedious and repetitive tasks to free up your time for more important things.
By outsourcing your payroll needs, they offer numerous benefits. By outsourcing payroll, you’ll be receiving the most accurate, professional, and meaningful payrolls, according to your company size and wages. You won’t encounter any problems with payroll processing and will greatly enhance the relationship with your company’s employees.
Payroll providers also ensure that all documents are filled out correctly, according to the law. You can be assured it’s 100% accurate with payroll processing. With a good payroll service provider, you won’t have to worry about the penalties of tax and any other penalties which may occur because of errors.
Training Employees in Payroll software for Restaurants
Payroll isn’t something that can be learned overnight or even a job that can be learned in a few weeks. These jobs take a long time and a lot of effort to learn how to do it correctly. The profit in knowing how to do payroll, however, is huge as you don’t want to get all your employees trained just to have them go away. What’s involved in training employees in payroll?
Training employees in payroll software isn’t a hard thing to do. All it takes is a couple of weeks and you have employees who are trained enough that they can do payroll themselves. This leaves your company not only with trained employees but also a company with easily manageable payroll. Here are some things you should take into mind when training employees in payroll.
When you train somebody in payroll it’s important to remember that all of your employees will have different skills and different grades of education. Some employees will have passed high school while others might have a college degree. In general, your employees will range from grades 6th to 12th and grades 9th to 12th. In general, training employees in payroll is first and foremost creating a statistical process that will be used by all of your employees. All of these employees will have different skills and different degrees. This is important to realize, and you shouldn’t expect everybody to comprehend payroll and payroll taxes in the same way.
Firstly, you should make sure that your employees know all of the numbers that will be involved in the process and also make sure they know what all of those numbers mean. They should know not only what the number means, but why it was entered in the process. It is also very important to instil confidence in the minds of your employees. This is very important because it’s a task that involves payroll. Training employees in payroll software involves instilling confidence in their minds that they are doing it correctly. This will help ensure that they always try to do their best and will also help them to feel like they’re involved in the process.
Training employees in payroll software also involves giving your employees access to any documents that they are likely to need in order to do their job. This should include not just payroll tax documents, but all of the documents associated with the job. You may even want to give them access to the administrative software that you use so that they can practice. This will help your employees to learn how to use the software, and if they need to learn how to use a new software or a different software, they will be more likely to be able to do so if they’re already familiar with the software you use.
Finally, you should make sure that you train employees in payroll regularly. It’s not something that you can do once and say, “Alright, you’re trained.” Any system can change, and you shouldn’t expect your employees to remember everything forever. Training employees in payroll should be taken as a regular task as part of your overall policy in finance. Training employees in payroll software should be done on an ongoing basis so that you can adjust to the changes brought about by new policies from the taxman. You should also remember to impress upon your employees the importance of their role in payroll and the importance of payroll software and the processes they perform. Training employees in payroll software should be a positive, constructive process that emphasises the importance of the work done by your employees and the importance of the role they play in your company.
As you can see, training employees in payroll is something that, while it seems like a small thing, has a huge impact on the way your company functions, and it’s something that a professional payroll agency can take care of. If you need assistance with training your employees, talk to your local payroll agency that can help you with payroll processing.
- Important Elements in Setting up payroll software for your business.
Before you decide to have payroll software for your property management business, you need to be aware of some of the things involved in setting up the software. There are things you need to consider in terms of payroll software and how it will work with your property management software. First, find and analyze your current payroll software. You need to know whether you have enough data to run payroll using the software. For example, you need to know how many employees you hire each month. You need to know how many of the employees take part in interstate commerce. You also need to estimate how many hours your employees work during the year. In addition, you need to know the tax rates in the places where your employees work. You also need to know what percentage of taxes you will pay each year.
When you have considered all these things, you will need to find new payroll software. You should look for new software that works with your property management software. You can also find software that will provide you with a template. This template will just be something you put in across the top of your payroll. It will show you how much you owe the IRS or other tax authorities. By filling in the blanks, you will know how much you will owe your workers. This software is ideal for you because it allows you to get a warrant in the middle of the year. You can look up when you updated your payroll, and the software will show you exactly how much you owe the IRS. If you need to make adjustments, the payroll software can tell you the amount you should have paid.
Any business that handles payroll should have this kind of software. Even if you are not currently paying out payroll to your employees, you may start to do so at a later time. If you own a property management business, you may need to be up to date on all current payroll regulations. You won’t need to worry about making mistakes and getting money or fines for mistakes.
How do you calculate your company’s Payroll?
When calculating payroll, you need to find the right payroll software for your business. Payroll software can help you calculate payroll quickly and easily. Some of the features that payroll software needs to have are a built in calculator, the ability to run payroll reports, and the capacity to integrate with payroll tax software. You should also look for payroll software that updates taxes for you.
When you buy payroll software you will need to understand how it works. Overtime and vacation time needs to be determined by you. You will also need to decide on the overtime rate and what method you’re going to use to calculate vacation time. For example, you will need to decide how many hours your employees have to work before they qualify for the maximum amount of vacation time. You should also decide how much vacation time they will deduct from. When you decide on these things, the payroll software will do the rest. It will show you the tax rate and the company’s payroll will go up or down as a result. You should also look for payroll software that allows you to update your overtime and vacation policies online.
If you run a small company, you may not need to have a payroll tax reporting software. However, if you run a larger company, you will certainly want to have payroll tax reporting software. For example, if you have three or more people working full time, you need to file payroll tax reports every week. These reports will show the total payroll that you have paid for the past week and the total amount that you paid in payroll income taxes. If you use payroll software, you will just be typing information into the payroll software, and it will automatically file your payroll tax reports.
You should also look for payroll software that is compatible with state payroll taxes. Of course, you will also need to get into contact with your state tax department to find out the payroll taxes you need to pay. It will save you a lot of time if the payroll software is compatible with the payroll tax software for your state.
A payroll software that has a payroll tax reporting software is great for your business because it will save you a lot of time. This software should have a built in calculator. It should also be compatible with the payroll tax software for your state.
Documenting Your Restaurant Payroll Processes
Providing proper training for your restaurant staff to ensure that all aspects of payroll are correctly performed in your restaurant is an important way to build your business. Training the employees on the intricacies of payroll will give them a sense of responsibility in this important part of the operation allowing you to trust that the work is completed as needed.
It is hard to imagine, but long ago there was no such thing as a payroll service. Companies had to calculate payroll themselves using complicated calculations or the company would have to hire a payroll specialist to handle the work. Thankfully, since the invention of computers and payroll software, companies can calculate payroll accurately and promptly.
To show you how much you would save over the course of a year by using a payroll service, let’s look at two examples:
Scenario 1:
Assume you are McDonald’s Corporation and your company pays out $2.2 billion in payroll throughout the year. Yes, that’s billion with a “b.” This is an outrageous amount of payroll, but it is a very simple way to show the overall savings on payroll by using a payroll service. Without the service, the company would have to hire someone to handle payroll. Let’s say that it would cost the company $100,000 per year to hire the person to handle payroll. Now the company spends $2.2 billion on payroll, but if they spend $100,000 to hire a payroll specialist’s company, then they are going to pay $2.2 billion plus $100,000 for a total of $2.3 billion. That is $100,000 of savings that they wouldn’t have realized using a traditional payroll process.
Scenario 2:
Assume the payroll for your company is $15,000 per month. If your company had to hire someone to handle the payroll, let’s say that the company would have to pay $1,000 per month for the service, for a total of $12,000 per year. If your company had a payroll of $15,000 per month, you would need to pay $144,000 per year in payroll costs if you were using a traditional payroll process.
There are two major advantages to using a payroll service. First, payroll is a detailed process. With calculations, tax obligations, and payroll withholdings, it can quickly become complicated to handle on your own. Second, payroll is a full-time activity, with the payroll specialist ready to go as soon as the payroll begins. Both of these aspects of using a store payroll service will save your company time and money.
Because of the complexity and time involved with doing your payroll on your own, you should consider using the services of a professional payroll service company. Read the section on the advantages of using a payroll service to see just how much time and money you can save. Remember, too, that we are discussing the cost of doing your own payroll versus using a payroll service.
Think about the ways that using a payroll service will protect your business and benefit you as the business owner.
A payroll service provides a great way for small companies with simple payroll requirements to reduce costs and increase efficiency. You simply send your payroll information to the payroll service, and they will handle all payroll calculations and filings.
Using third-party payroll services will save you time and money by eliminating the necessity of keeping up with state regulations and resolving employee disputes.
