Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#11

Post by stanleydrew » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:09 PM UTC

lrm242 wrote: post #3

We use Quickbooks. It's painless. Except for the Intuit part. But what are you gonna do? It's nice to have one tool for all accounting and payroll.

For bookkeeping I've just set up my own spreadsheet system. It's nothing complicated, just a standard double entry set of accounts that I manually update since we don't do that many transactions. Then I just pass those to an accountant at the end of the year to prepare the federal return.

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#12

Post by stanleydrew » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:11 PM UTC

mattculbreth wrote: post #2

We use Bank of America--really easy. They handle everything for us except for the initial setup with the Federal and State governments--you still have to get your IDs and what not. NOTE: make sure you get some accounting guidance here. It matters how you do this if you want to minimize taxes.

How much does BofA charge for this service?

And on accounting guidance do you mean get advice on distributions vs wages?

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#13

Post by spencerfry » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:17 PM UTC

You don't need payroll until you've actually got employees. You can just distribute the amount earned based on equity ownership across the members in the LLC. This is termed "disbursements".

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#14

Post by ilener » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:17 PM UTC

We are a startup in Palo Alto and have developed accounting and payroll integrated into one web-based product called Exponent. It's much more functional than QuickBooks AND less expensive.

Here's the online demo login:

https://www.thinkexponent.com/ e-mail: demo@demo.com password: demo

Payroll is located in the Accounting tab.

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#15

Post by brandon272 » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:20 PM UTC

I would get in touch with a qualified accountant or bookkeeper who has experience in payroll. There are a lot of things to bear in mind and options to consider when you're doing payroll and having to calculate tax deductions. Miscalculating can lead to audits.

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#16

Post by stanleydrew » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:24 PM UTC

j2d2 wrote: post #9

I'm not sure if this will do what you're looking for, but I really like Harvest. www.harvestapp.com.

Harvest looks really good and I think I could really use it for invoicing and time-tracking for some consulting contracts we are doing. I'm not sure it does payroll though. Can you use it for payroll?

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#17

Post by akmiller » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:27 PM UTC

I currently use PayCycle and they provide a very nice solution and it's very affordable. Intuit recently acquired them, so I imagine they will become even more integrated into their tools.

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#18

Post by mcculley » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:37 PM UTC

pumper wrote: post #7

We use ADP. Its expensive - $125 per cycle. Another option is paycycle, but i havent used them

We use PayCycle. It is $42.99 + (numEmployees - 5) * 1.50 per month no matter how many checks you generate. This means you aren't penalized for paying weekly or for generating reimbursement checks out of phase with your normal payroll cycle. I really like it. It generates export files which I import easily into QuickBooks.

I'm very happy with it, I just wish it had an API so I could plug my timesheet system directly into it. Presently I have to transcribe from a web report into their interface but as we only have 16 employees total, it is not a big burden.

We evaluated ADP and they were much more expensive for our use case.

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#19

Post by stanleydrew » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:40 PM UTC

brandon272 wrote: post #15

I would get in touch with a qualified accountant or bookkeeper who has experience in payroll. There are a lot of things to bear in mind and options to consider when you're doing payroll and having to calculate tax deductions. Miscalculating can lead to audits.

You have someone you can recommend?

Re: Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?

#20

Post by stanleydrew » Fri, Jul 31, 2009, 9:45 PM UTC

mcculley wrote: post #18

pumper wrote: post #7

We use ADP. Its expensive - $125 per cycle. Another option is paycycle, but i havent used them

We use PayCycle. It is $42.99 + (numEmployees - 5) * 1.50 per month no matter how many checks you generate. This means you aren't penalized for paying weekly or for generating reimbursement checks out of phase with your normal payroll cycle. I really like it. It generates export files which I import easily into QuickBooks. I'm very happy with it, I just wish it had an API so I could plug my timesheet system directly…

So with two employees i pay $38.50/mo? Or did you mean max( (numEmployees-5), 0 ) * $1.50