Payroll & Time Tracking Options for Painting Businesses
Jun 21, 2024
Daniel Honan
Unlock the secrets to seamless payroll management in the painting industry with our expert dialogue featuring Daniel, the brains behind Bookkeeping for Painters, and myself, Richard, your tax director guide. We tackle the nitty-gritty of paying your team accurately and legally, spotlighting top-notch systems like Gusto—known for its affordability and automation—and weighing it against the heavy hitters like ADP and Paychex. Daniel and I dissect the pros and cons, giving you the insight needed to steer clear of legal pitfalls and streamline your business finances.
Take a front-row seat as we pair payroll intricacies with cutting-edge time tracking solutions, tailored for the dynamic needs of professional painters. We scrutinize the evolution of time tracking, from GPS-enabled apps ensuring accountability to the integration within customer relationship management systems. Sharing our own experiences and inviting listener stories through our Facebook group, this episode is an interactive deep-dive into the tools that could reshape your business operations, promising efficiency, cost savings, and compliance peace of mind. Join us for an enlightening discussion that could very well be the fresh coat of knowledge your business needs.
Unlock the secrets to seamless payroll management in the painting industry with our expert dialogue featuring Daniel, the brains behind Bookkeeping for Painters, and myself, Richard, your tax director guide. We tackle the nitty-gritty of paying your team accurately and legally, spotlighting top-notch systems like Gusto—known for its affordability and automation—and weighing it against the heavy hitters like ADP and Paychex. Daniel and I dissect the pros and cons, giving you the insight needed to steer clear of legal pitfalls and streamline your business finances.
Take a front-row seat as we pair payroll intricacies with cutting-edge time tracking solutions, tailored for the dynamic needs of professional painters. We scrutinize the evolution of time tracking, from GPS-enabled apps ensuring accountability to the integration within customer relationship management systems. Sharing our own experiences and inviting listener stories through our Facebook group, this episode is an interactive deep-dive into the tools that could reshape your business operations, promising efficiency, cost savings, and compliance peace of mind. Join us for an enlightening discussion that could very well be the fresh coat of knowledge your business needs.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Profitable Painter Podcast. The mission of this podcast is simple to help you navigate the financial and tax aspects of starting, running and scaling a professional painting business, from the brushes and ladders to the spreadsheets and balance sheets. We've got you covered. But before we dive in, a quick word of caution While we strive to provide accurate and up-to-date financial and tax information, nothing you hear on this podcast should be considered as financial advice specifically for you or your business. We're here to share general knowledge and experiences, not to replace the tailored advice you get from a professional financial advisor or tax consultant.
Speaker 2:
We strongly recommend you seeking individualized advice before making any significant financial decision. This is Daniel, the founder of.
Speaker 3:
Bookkeeping for Painters. And this is Richard, tax director. How's it going today, Daniel? Anything's new going on.
Speaker 2:
It's going well. I got Memorial Day weekend right ahead of us, so that's exciting, I guess.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, around here.
Speaker 2:
What's that?
Speaker 3:
I was going to say around here, that's kind of like the official start to summer Memorial Day through Labor Day. Now in Florida.
Speaker 2:
You get summer all year long, but it's still a great time to cook out, spend some time with the family Yep, absolutely. It's a good time to spend time with the family, which I'm definitely doing this weekend. Get a full house, all the kids, the wife and I'm going to check out the farmer's market. Should be a good time. But today's topic we're going to get into is paying employees. How can you pay employees? What should you use? How should you track their time? What are the options out there? Because there's a whole bunch of options and hopefully we're on this episode. We'll demystify. What do you have? What's available? What are most people using?
Speaker 3:
Cash. Most people use cash to pay their employees. Yeah, no, no, don't pay your employees in cash. Definitely run their wages through some kind of uh payroll. So that's the way the government can get their cut yes, I know in past episodes we've talked about uh.
Speaker 2:
I think the latest one was someone out of connecticut a painting contractor in connecticut got hit with like ridiculous amount of jail time and penalties for not reporting cash for a couple years. So it's definitely something to keep in mind. It sucks, but you gotta pay your share of taxes, otherwise the government's going to come after you.
Speaker 3:
Yep, have that paper trail, show that you reported the income properly, because they will doing manual payroll where we are filling out the 941s for the IRS and for the state and handwriting, you know, paycheck stubs. Although when I was 18, I did work for a contractor who used to do that for me used to handwrite out my paycheck stubs me used to hand write out my paycheck stubs Nowadays. Well, back then it was very expensive for a company that only had maybe a handful of employees to work with one of the big payroll companies. Nowadays we have a lot more options and a lot more affordable options.
Speaker 2:
Yep. So for payroll there's three typical options that we see. Number one is gusto, number two is QuickBooks Online payroll. Number three is using a firm or somebody like ADP or Paychex. So the most common just to to cut the chase the most common one we see is gusto. I would say if we were I don't actually have the, uh, I should, I should have pulled up the metrics for. But I would say the majority of our clients are using gusto, um, and it is, and for good reason. I know, uh, we use it in our, in our company, to do our own payroll and then we help a lot of folks use it in their companies.
Speaker 2:
So Gusto is great for it's very inexpensive, it's not, you know, you're not going to spend too much on it. It has really good support. It has really good built-in features for human resources and it's also just easy to use software. It's it's relatively new company like, not that new, but it's. It feels very fresh Like the. It's very intuitive software and it's not clunky like some software payroll softwares are. So it's easy to run payroll, easy for your employees to log in and pull their own pay stubs or their own W-2s. So it's a good overall experience with Gusto, especially considering the price.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I like that. Everything is cloud-based so, like you said, your employees can log in wherever they are. They can get their paycheck stubs, they can get their W-2s. They are, they can get their paycheck stubs, they can get their W-2s. Gusto has some very nice metrics and charts so your employees can see how much they're getting paid, what kind of taxes are being taken out, and then, of course, all those features are available for you as the business owner too. You can log in wherever you're at.
Speaker 3:
They've got a nice payroll on autopilot feature, so if you happen to have certain employees who get paid maybe a salary or the same amount every week, you can set it and forget it. I really love that for S-corp shareholders owners of S-corps who need to be paid a reasonable salary set it and forget it and you don't have to worry about it. So, yeah, very feature-rich and, like you said, daniel, I was surprised at how good their support is too, because usually, when you're talking about online companies, especially ones that have invested heavily in a nice user interface and a lot of features, maybe they skimp on support, and the times that I've had to call Gusto for support, I've always been able to speak to someone in a reasonable amount of time. They're knowledgeable and they try to see the problem through to completion. So not everything's perfect, but I got to say I was pretty impressed with the effort they put forth?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely. And now, with that being said, there are a couple of downsides with using Gusto, as with anything else. It has a pretty good integration with QuickBooks Online, but it's not great. It's not as good as QuickBooks Online payrolls integration with itself, understandably. So it does integrate really well with QuickBooks Online, which everyone we work with uses for their bookkeeping, and it will sync over the information and it works pretty well, but it's just not super great. So that's one downside there. Especially if you want to do something like job costing, it makes it a little bit more difficult with that integration. The way that they sync over that payroll data.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. So if you're like really heavily relying on maybe QuickBooks time, job costing, maybe the second option would be better for you then, which is QuickBooks payroll or Intuit payroll, because that integrates really well with the QBO projects and with QBO time.
Speaker 2:
Yes, so QuickBooks Online Payroll. If you have QuickBooks Online already, there's probably a tab that you can see that says Payroll. Click on that tab and you can sign up to sign up with QuickBooks Online Payroll and they'll guide you through that setup and a lot of folks this is a close number two as far as the amount of clients that use this and it works just fine. And the real plus here is that if you want to do job costing in QuickBooks Online using QuickBooks Online projects, it's going to work really nicely with that and, like you said, Richard, it integrates well with QuickBooks Time, which is a time tracker that's also built into QuickBooks Online so that people can track their time in there, syncs really nicely over to the QuickBooks Online payroll and then that payroll data will sync really nicely into QuickBooks projects for job-costed labor, so that system works really well.
Speaker 3:
One thing I like a lot about QuickBooks Payroll is I don't have to go into a different website or area to access my payroll information. So if I'm already in QuickBooks working on my books, I can just tab over to payroll and it's all right there. I don't need to log in someplace else.
Speaker 2:
Yep, and along those same lines. The integration. It's all integrated, so the recording of the payroll itself. They have all that detailed information that can be broken out into job cost of data or class tracking. All that stuff can be done right there. Now the downside with QuickBooks payroll is the support. It's not really that great. I've first-hand experience hitting on the phone or chatting with QuickBooks. Online support is always a significant emotional event for me, so that is definitely a big downside to using QuickBooks Payroll.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, intuit's a big company and I think as you grow your support becomes it struggles a bit, so I would agree with that. It becomes it struggles a bit, so I would agree with that, you know. One other thing I might say is that while QuickBooks isn't difficult to use, I don't find its interface and ease of use to be quite as good as Gusto. Now, that might be a personal preference. I do know some people who really like using QuickBooks. They find it intuitive. Personally, I kind of like the way Gusto handles things a little bit better, but QuickBooks is not bad by any means.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, in regards to the QuickBooks support, it reminds me of Steve Jobs, where he was talking about the Bozo explosion that you have to look out for in your company. Have you heard of this?
Speaker 3:
I have not like. Bozo the clown.
Speaker 2:
Basically, he's like when, when you're growing a company, you're scaling the company and you know you have to get A players in, and if you don't get A players in and you start getting B players, the B players are going to hire, hire the C players and then from there you're just going to have a bozo explosion where your company's going to be filled, filled with bozos, uh, which is just a hilarious expression. So that's what I think of when I think of quickbooks. Support is just a bozo explosion, like whenever I'm trying to talk to somebody over there, um, anyway. So going to the next one is another option. So we talked about gusto.
Speaker 2:
We could talk about QuickBooks payroll. Another one is using something like ADP paychecks or maybe a firm to uh, white glove, your, your payroll for you, um, to. To start specifically with ADP and paychecks, I think the benefit here is it can scale. They have offers for smaller businesses if you just have a couple of employees, but it can also scale up if you have 40 employees or even more than that. So it can help in that regard.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I mean ADP paychecks. Those are the big players. Those are the ones who are running payroll for companies that have tens of thousands of employees. So there's no fear there that you're going to outgrow your payroll provider. You'll start off with one. They do have those small packages for smaller businesses and that's where you'll definitely start off at, but if you grow, you'll have a payroll provider who will grow with you Plus, being kind of like the legacy payroll companies. They've got a lot of assets behind them. They've got a lot of experience running payroll, so their support tends to be knowledgeable and they tend to have just more of a budget for things like technology and reporting and things like that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, Now the downside to ADP paychecks, those type of payroll firms is the expense. Those type of payroll firms is the expense You're likely going to pay way more using those, even their smaller packages, than you will if you go with Gusto or QuickBooks.
Speaker 3:
Payroll yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:
And I would say even another downside would be the integrations are not that great either, so getting the information into your QuickBooks Online might be a challenge as well.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, one thing I do want to give as a positive for ADP and paycheck is they tend to have local representatives. So if you ever feel the need, like you need, to talk to a human being face to face, a lot of times their local reps will be able to meet you at your local coffee shop or something like that. You've got someone that you can call who's not too far away.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely All right. So those are your basic options for payroll. Now the other thing you have to consider when figuring out how you're going to pay your employees is how you're going to track their time assuming not everyone's salary. So time tracking is important and you got to choose what your payrolls. Ideally you're choosing your payroll software with, also identifying what you're using your time tracking for, making sure that they can work together. So for time tracking, we typically see folks using either Gusto time, quickbookstime, clockshark, busybusy or a time tracker that's in their CRM, like, for example, jobber has time tracking in there. I believe TripJobs also is just coming out with time tracking as well in there, and WorkGlue has some time tracking. So you have a lot of those CRMs that have time tracking built in, so we'll go through each one.
Speaker 2:
We'll start with Gusto. Gusto time tracking is good if you just have like a very simple. Maybe you have an office admin and a production manager that tracks their time. Just today set somebody up on that so they don't have anybody working on the jobs. They don't need to do job costing for these individuals, they just need to track their time a simple time tracking and that exports really easily into Gusto Payroll to run. Now, obviously, if you're using a different payroll provider, gusto time does not make sense at all, so don't do that. But if you're using Gusto for your payroll and you just need simple time tracking, the time tracker that's built into Gusto works just fine.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that makes sense, Kind of. Yeah, if you're already with Gusto, keep it in-house as long as your time tracking needs are basic enough, where you don't need something that has more robust features. Now, Daniel, you said when you were setting someone up today with GustoTime is that an additional cost to use GustoTime or is that included with Gusto's payroll services?
Speaker 2:
So Gusto's base, like their cheapest package, does not include time tracking. But the next stepped up, their mid grade package does, does include time tracking and it's be a lot cheaper. If you just have simple time tracking needs to just use that simple time tracker that's built in to the mid-grade or higher. Actually, today the person I was working with they also had clock shark and they were going to use clock shark with gusto but it was just not necessary because they only had an office person and production manager. So it was like save your money, just use gusto time tracking and it's built right in and it's there on the mid grade package anyway. So you know they, they save some money there.
Speaker 2:
Um, now, the downside with the guest of time tracking is that if you need any job costing, it's not going to really be useful for that. Uh, they do have a project feature, but it's it doesn't integrate with QuickBooks online. It's not going to be a super useful. It's going to require a lot of manual data entries, so I wouldn't recommend it. The next option is QuickBooks time, which used to be t-sheets back in the day. Now it's QuickBooks time. Uh, the the main benefit with QuickBooks time is we kind of touched on it earlier is it integrates really nicely with QuickBooks Payroll and also QuickBooks Projects, so this is great if you want to do job costing within QuickBooks Online, especially if you're using QuickBooks Projects. The QuickBooks Time support seems to be a little bit better than the QuickBooks Online online support. I would say they seem to be a little bit better and I guess not not not as many bozos over there maybe they retained the old t sheets support team there.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, I mean it definitely downgraded when, when t sheets was bought by Intuit, like the support used to be really good, but it's still not as bad as QuickBooks support. But there's still time, all right. So there's. The next one is Clockshark, busy, busy, and these work well. They have good integrations. I can import timesheets into QuickBooks Online. They can also pull QuickBooks projects over so you can log into the QuickBooks project appropriately. So these integrations Clockshark and BusyBusy they have great integrations with QuickBooks Online. You can still do job costing. It's not as seamless as QuickBooks Time, but it still works pretty well.
Speaker 3:
And these apps were designed to be time trackers foremost. So the user interface, the ease of use, is going to be really good. On Clark excuse me Clark, that's a hard word to say Clark Shark and Busy, busy. Even if it's hard to pronounce, it looks good, it's easy to use, just hard to pronounce, at least for me.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yes, and another thing that's better is their support. That was actually one of the things that went into. It bought t-sheets and the support just went, you know, went downhill from there. A lot of people started using clock shark and busy busy, just because the support was was better and they they're easier to get a hold of. They'll help you get things set up. So they're a good option if you are looking for that extra support. The last piece is the CRMs that have time tracking and there's benefits here with if you're doing your project management in the CRM, things can kind of your employees can easily log in to a project in the CRM or production management software. So it makes that experience a little bit seamless for more seamless for the employee. So they don't have multiple apps like for their CRM. Then they get a login to the time tracker, so it has that benefit. The downside is that the integrations are not that great.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, you were kind of mentioning how the CRMs they have time tracking and probably the upside to that is that it's built in so you're not paying extra for it like you might be with a dedicated time tracking app. The downside is that the integrations usually aren't that great. They weren't really designed to integrate with anything. This is for basic time tracking. My personal experience has been. Sometimes they can be a little clunky, they can be a little slow. Not a big deal if you have employees who clock in at 9 am and clock out at 5 pm. But if you're doing a lot of different work streams where you're trying to track, you know individual projects and your employees are constantly starting and stopping their time, you might want to find something that runs more smoothly, that doesn't, you know, freeze up and allows them to quickly clock in and out, or your employees might resist using it or some stuff might not get tracked. But yeah, I mean there's a lot of different options out there for time tracking. We just kind of named off some of the more popular ones.
Speaker 3:
You may have time tracking software that you really enjoy and helps you stay productive. I know I've talked to some painters who they have time tracking that that fits into their phones or their apps on their phone. The 21st century right Like? Ok, boomers's, not a little guy, I'm sorry, julie. So you might have an app on your phone that your employees can use to clock in when they hit the job site and it might have it might have GPS features enabled so that they can actually prove that they clocked in on the job site and not at the fast food store on the way over.
Speaker 3:
So, yeah, we'd be really interested to hear if you have a time tracking software that you enjoy, what it is, what you like about it, maybe what you don't like about it, or a payroll system that you really love. If you'd like to leave your comments, you can always join our Facebook group. We'd be happy to have you there and you can let us know what you think or possibly suggest ideas for future episodes. But we really appreciate you listening and we hope to see you on the next episode.