Get a grip on employee payroll and records

Consider a service for 5 employees, or 50.
Some services allow you to add services as your needs or employees increase. PayCycle, for example, starts at $14.99 per month for 5 employees, then adds to the cost as the number of employees goes up (to a max of 50) and you add features such as electronic tax filing.

Legacy.com, a leading provider of online obituaries for newspapers, uses SurePayroll ($38.00 per payroll for a 5-person company; pricing varies based on company size) to maintain the records for its 50 employees.

"Our billing and receivables operation is very customer-focused, and our customers really appreciate our responsiveness," said Legacy.com CEO Stopher Bartol. "Every hour we save by efficiently outsourcing payroll is an hour we can invest in better serving our customers."

Look for a setup wizard and ease of integration.
Many payroll services offer a wizard setup that lets you get started even if you're in the middle of a tax year. In addition, make sure you can connect your payroll service with QuickBooks or Microsoft Money if you already use business accounting software.

Record all employee information in one place.
Look for a service that lets you maintain employee records along with payroll. For example, if you're just calling in payroll each week but you still have to manually keep track of vacation and sick days, you'll have two different sets of data to check and maintain. Keeping it all in one place ties everything together.

Look for online access.
"We operate completely remotely, even from all of our employees," said Kirk Davis, co-owner of KD Connecticut Management, an insurance adjusting company with 19 employees. It uses the Web-based PayCycle Payroll Plus ($42.99 per month for 5 employees, including electronic filing; pricing varies based on company size) for online payroll, which the company has found to be five times cheaper and more accurate than the previous phone-based service.

Legacy.com's Bartol also likes using the services online. "We get the benefits of a full-service provider that takes care of all the filings and payments, as well as the convenience of being able to manage everything through an online account," he said.

Make sure your employees can access their information online.
"I access my payroll stubs via a secure site provided by SurePayroll, just as any of our 50 employees can access their personal information," said Bartol. "This is a time-saver for our controller and also appreciated by our employees, who have 24/7 access to the information they might need."

"We don't even have to e-mail stubs to the employees, which is a new feature in PayCycle," added Davis. "The employees can go look at the stubs by logging on to the Web site themselves."

Pay taxes electronically.
Is there a way to pay taxes automatically? SurePayroll and PayCycle Payroll Plus let you do this, but PayCycle Payday (its least-expensive service) doesn't. Payroll Plus lets you file all federal and most state taxes electronically; check whether your location is supported at the state level.

For full service, consider HR outsourcing.
If you also want to handle such services as employee benefits and labor compliance, and not just your payroll, consider paying for a full HR solution, such as the top-level service of Payroll.com or other human resource services such as Gevity or ADP TotalSource.

	PayCycle Payroll Basic	PayCycle Payroll Plus	PayChex Online	Sure Payroll	Advan- tage Payroll Instant Payroll	QuickBooks Assisted Payroll	CompuPay Xpress- Payroll
Cal- culate taxes and deduc- tions	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
E-file federal taxes	Yes ($24.99)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
E-file state taxes	No	Yes (some states)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes for one state (multi- state op- tional)	Yes for one state (multi- state op- tional)
Direct deposit	Included	Included	Optional	In- cluded	8 in- cluded, addi- tional optional	Optional	Yes (limit 2 accounts per em- ployee)
Vacation and sick days	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes (with em- ployee access)
View online pay stubs	Yes	Yes	No	Yes (via e-mail)	No	Yes	Yes
Con- tractor pay- ments	No	Yes	No	Opt- ional	Yes (hourly rate)	Yes	No
Toll- free support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	In some states	Yes	Yes
Price (for 5 em- ployees, weekly)*	$24.99 /mo	$42.99 /mo	Call for quote	About $38 per payroll (semi- month- ly)	Call for quote	$59/mo	$79/mo