When payroll is worth outsourcing
Payroll for one employee is easy to do yourself. The question is not whether you can, it is what happens in the week you are on holiday or snowed under.
Payroll for one employee is easy to do yourself. After that the question changes.
Payroll is not arithmetic
Calculating the pay is addition and subtraction, and it is the easiest part of the job. The time and the risk are elsewhere.
The Incomes Register report is due within five calendar days of the payment date, and the deadline does not move to suit your week. The exceptions are their own matter: sick leave, holiday bonus, part-time work, unpaid leave. And the percentages change annually, which means last year’s routine is this year’s wrong routine.
Three points where the line is crossed
The first employee. This is where the fixed obligations arrive all at once. One payslip a month, and still the same body of rules that twenty would bring.
Pay stops being the same figure every month. Hourly work, shift supplements, commission, overtime. Variable pay means each month is its own piece of work rather than a copy of the last one.
One person knows how to do it. This is the most dangerous of the three and the least often counted. If one person can run payroll, that person cannot fall ill the week before payday. A deadline does not know who is on holiday.
What it costs
The figures are on the pricing page, and they are deliberately tied to the number of payslips rather than to a package, so a small employer does not pay for a large one.
When comparing, count your own time, including what you are not doing while you do payroll. If you bill your own work by the hour, you already have a price for it.
One trap recurs. The price of outsourcing is an invoice and the price of your own time is not, so the comparison gets made against zero. Zero is the wrong figure: your time comes out of something else, and payroll lands at the turn of the month, which is rarely the week with the most room in it.
What outsourcing does not remove
You are the employer. An accounting firm does the work and answers for the work, but the obligations belong to the employer, and employment contracts, working time records and occupational health stay with you.
That is worth saying plainly, because outsourcing is often sold as though liability transferred. It does not. The work transfers, and so does keeping track of the deadlines.
That same boundary is worth asking about when you request a quote: what is in the service, and what stays with you. The answer tells you more about an accounting firm than its price does.
How we handle it
We produce the payslips, run the payments and file the Incomes Register reports as one piece of work, and payroll sets out what that covers.
If you are weighing this up, tell us how many employees you have and how often you pay them and we will say what it would cost here. If doing it yourself still makes sense in your situation, we will say that too.
Frequently asked
- Is payroll worth outsourcing for a single employee?
- Often yes, but not because of the calculation. One employee means one payslip and still every deadline, report and insurance obligation that twenty would bring. The fixed cost falls on one payslip, so the cost per payslip is at its highest exactly when the work is at its lightest.
- What actually takes the time in payroll?
- Not calculating the pay, but everything around it. Incomes Register reports inside the deadline, the exceptions such as sick leave and holiday bonus, and the percentages that change every year. An ordinary month is quick and an unusual month is not.
- What does outsourcing not remove?
- The employer's obligations remain yours. An accounting firm does the work and answers for the work, but you are the employer, and employment contracts, working time records and occupational health stay with you.
- Can payroll be moved mid-year?
- Yes. A change is simplest at the turn of the year, because annual reports and accumulated figures carry over most cleanly then, but mid-year works too. What matters is that the accumulated figures are carried across correctly rather than started from zero.
Tell us what you need, and we will work out what it actually takes.
A free conversation, about 30 minutes: we go through document volumes, the number of people on the payroll and the services you need, and tell you the exact price. We do not charge for preparing a quote, and the conversation commits you to nothing.