Professional features for accountants and bookkeepers
As you build your bookkeeping and accounting practice you’ll face a number of issues. Client retention will likely be top of your list and there are a number of things you can do to help:
- Consider moving to value based pricing – pricing your services based on your client’s perceived value of the service. There’s a great series of articles written on this:
http://blog.xero.com/2013/03/overview-of-value-based-pricing/
- Ensure you develop a client communication plan – updates, reminders and notifications should all be part of your regular dialogue with your clients. If you aren’t already using CRM in your practice, consider moving to a combined bookkeeping system that includes or can integrate these client relationship management tools.
- Bring payroll back in house – this additional service you provide your clients is the single most effective way to remain in regular communication with your clients. Your perceived value increases significantly (you are helping get their employees paid – what could be more valuable?) PaymentEvolution helps you bring payroll back in house without the added burdens and cost – in fact, our existing bookkeeper and accountant partners find that payroll is a strong revenue driver for them.
If you are considering payroll processing in your firm, you’ll want a strong set of features to ensure it’s easy and flexible to perform these functions for your clients. We’ve recently added a series of features that will make it even more profitable to offer payroll services to your clients:
Multiple logins and permissions
You can use our advanced security features and permission model to delegate certain tasks to clients. For example, you can give individuals in your client’s organization the ability to enter timesheets on their own (saving you the data entry and potential errors). You may also choose to give your clients the ability to perform most steps in a payrun (enter salaries, modify / add employees etc) but save the final payments for you to authorize. With PaymentEvolution Payroll, you have a number of choices on the permissions you can give your clients – giving you the ultimate flexibility to run your practice the way you want.
Enhanced security – PIN codes
We’ve introduced PIN-based verification for payments to ensure that only the authorized payment officer of a company approves payments. A client can have your firm do all the payroll processing but save the final payment approval for themselves.
Multi-company management and dashboard
We’ve enhanced our multi-company management dashboard giving you a quick way to navigate among your clients, view their employee profiles, edit their company settings. You’ll also see notifications on when a payrun needs to be finalized to ensure electronic payments are made on time to employees. With this powerful multi-company management interface, you’ll be able to streamline payroll processing for all your clients. If needed, you can also adjust your own master profile and login credentials. If clients leave, you can close or deactivate their accounts as well.
Co-branding options
Give your clients a consistent experience by branding your payroll service with your logo and company branding. Clients can even be directed to your unique URL and site address. The service is maintained and hosted by us so you don’t need to worry about legislative changes, updates or enhancements – we do all that for you.
Want to get started? Visit
http://PaymentEvolution.com/AccountantPlans
and register.
Reducing prices and adding features
We’re already Canada’s most cost-effective payroll and payments service but that hasn’t stopped us from adding features you want and bringing you the best service available. Effective today, we’re reducing the subscription fee for our Business Pro plan from $99/month to just $79/month on an annual renewal.
Already one of our most popular service offerings, we’ve expanded the Business Pro plan to include support from payroll specialists while reducing your monthly costs. This plan is best suited for companies with 20 or more employees and includes the option to brand the service for a consistent employee experience.
Like all our paid plans, we give you unlimited payruns and don’t charge for extras like Records of Employment, year-end tax documents or electronic employee payslips.
We also include a free employee self-service portal with their full personal payroll history as well as important tax documents like their T4, T4A and RL-1 slips.
Contact us to register your company or upgrade your existing plan.
Pay rules, enhanced security and tax forms
Our developers have been busy enhancing several key features of your payroll service. Pay rules, our powerful custom deductions, benefits and earnings feature, has gotten even better. We’ve added enhanced PIN-based security to payroll payments and we’ve updated the year-end process with the ability to create T4, T4A and RL-1 tax slips for your employees and contractors.
Pay rules
The pay rules feature has been updated to include several new features. First, we’ve segmented our out-of-the-box (default) rules from your custom (user-defined) rules so you can clearly see what you’ve customized for your pay runs.
Benefits
You can now set a custom T4 box number for each benefit you create – useful if you are creating an automobile benefit (box 34) or other taxable benefits (box 40)
Earnings
For custom earnings, you can now set your rules to be eligible for automatic vacation calculations or even set the rule to use the bonus / occasional earnings methodology for tax calculations
We’ve already seen several companies use this feature to include expense reimbursements as part of their payruns – a great way to reduce your expense reimbursement costs by including these payments as part of the payrun process.
Enhanced Security
We’ve added PIN-based security to the payrun process. This is used on the PAYMENTS stage of the process to ensure that only authorized personnel can approve and issue payments to employees.
You can use this in conjunction with our multi-user permissions and roles feature to, say setup a payroll manager to perform payruns for you but ensure that payments are authorized only by your company’s signing officer. Our accountant partners can also use the feature to run payroll on behalf of their clients but have them ‘approve’ the payments personally.
Support for T4, T4A and RL-1 slips
We’ve added support for common year end tax forms like the T4, T4A (often used for contractors) and RL-1 (for Québec-based employees). Using PaymentEvolution, you can easily create these year end tax forms without resorting to paper. Our fully electronic process will guide you through creating the forms from your payruns, and submitting these to the appropriate agencies. Even better – your employees will receive these important tax documents electronically, saving you the mailing and distribution costs. No longer will your employees ask for a re-print because they’ve lost their T4 slips – they can print their own copies by logging into their accounts.
Funding options for payroll
We increased the number of methods you can use to fund your employee payroll. Each option has its advantages and you can select the one that best fits your business and how you run payroll.
Pre-authorized debit
Our most popular option is ‘pre-authorized debit’. With this method, we automatically debit your company / source bank account for your payroll obligations and then make payments on your behalf to your staff and vendors. Payruns using this option must be completed 4 business days in advance of the payment date.
Bill payment
If you have ‘bill payment’ features in your online business banking service, you can send us the funds for your payrun. You’ll need to fund your payrun at least 2 business days prior to the payment date. You can select ‘bill payment’ in your payments profile
Wire transfers
If you do not have ‘bill payment’ facilities or need to send us funds from international banks, you can use our wire payment option. With this method you should fund your payroll at least 2 business days in advance of the payment date.
Ongoing enhancements
We continue to add new features and make the payroll process delightfully easy – it’s our commitment to you! If you have any suggestions or want to see a new feature, let us know in our product forums.
Event: The State of Canadian Small Business
Photo by Morris C.
On January 24 at 6:30 PM ET at Toronto’s Bier Markt King West (600 King Street West, Toronto, ON M5V 1M3), PaymentEvolution and online accounting provider (and partner) Kashoo will co-host a free, informal “State of Canadian Small Business” meetup.
The drinks and snacks are on us! We’re bringing together small business experts, advisors, service providers and others to talk about the Canadian small business ecosystem. Join other successful small business owners as we discuss trends, common experiences and best practices. You’ll also have a chance to check out some new to-be-released stuff from Kashoo and PaymentEvolution.
If you’re in the Greater Toronto Area – come join us! We are looking forward to meeting you there!
Shared payroll and multiple users
One of the advantages of using a cloud-based payroll service is sharing payroll responsibilities amongst your team. We’ve updated our multi-user access features to make it easier to share those responsibilities and delegate certain tasks (like recording the time your employees have worked).
Now when you create or modify an employee profile, you can set their permission level – granting them access to various aspects of the payroll service
There are now a total of 4 permission types / roles available in the system. The primary permission type is “Payroll Master”. This role (not visible in the employee profile) is your master account and is the default account used when you first create your company profile. It has full capabilities in the system and is the account you want to use when making changes to your company profile or updating your pay rules. The other 3 permission levels are available for you to assign to your employees.
The ‘timekeeper’ role was added so you could have a manager or team lead enter time sheets for a group of employees. The ‘payroll manager’ typically completes pay runs and views reports. If you set an employee to have ‘employee’ level access, they can only see their own pay history. To have staff access these additional features, they should login at
https://secure.paymentevolution.com/employee
. Here’s what a ‘payroll manager’ will see when they login:
They can switch between their own personal view (to see their own pay stub) and the company view (to process payroll). The timesheets link can be used to quickly enter the time worked by members of your staff.
We’re continuously improving your payroll service and adding features like these. Some points to note:
- Employees should continue using PayChequer.com to view their full pay history and tax documents.
- Self-entry of timesheets is not available broadly yet (but we’re working on it!)
- If you terminate an employee, they will no longer have access to payroll functions but can still view their own pay history at PayChequer.com
- Roles are only assignable to employees you’ve profiled in the system (users outside your organization cannot be assigned roles at this time)
Non-profits, Charities, Churches – integrated bookkeeping and payroll
Integrated online payroll from PaymentEvolution now available to Software4Nonprofits ACCOUNTS
Non-profits, charities and churches looking for a integrated bookkeeping and payroll service often had to resort to expensive tools or cobble together various pieces of software to efficiently run their organizations. We’re pleased to now offer integration with one of the leading accounting packages for non-profits in North America – Software4Nonprofits ACCOUNTS. By integrating our cloud-based payroll service with ACCOUNTS, Canadian non-profits can now efficiently run their organization while saving time (and money).
Getting started is simple – just login to your payroll account and enable Software4Nonprofits in the “addons” section. Once you map your chart of accounts, we’ll help you push general journal entries to your Software4Nonprofits ACCOUNTS file with all your payrun data. For details, please see our community article.
We recently launched ACCOUNTS to solve the bookkeeping and fund accounting needs of non-profits. With PaymentEvolution we can now offer truly affordable Canadian payroll services to our members. - Dan Cooperstock, founder of Software4Nonprofits
So if you are part of a non-profit, local charity or church – take a look at Software4Nonprofits and integrated Canadian payroll from PaymentEvolution.
Intregration with Saasu Online Accounting
Online Canadian payroll for Saasu from PaymentEvolution
Our partner community is growing! By popular demand we’re pleased to introduce integration with Saasu Online Accounting. Now you can get true Canadian payroll and balance your books with Saasu. As a leader in online accounting services, Saasu has been pioneering the ability to run your business in the cloud. Invoicing, bank reconciliation, expense management – and now Canadian payroll – PaymentEvolution and Saasu give you the tools you need to manage your business from anywhere.
Getting started is easy – just log into your payroll account and enable Saasu in the “addons” section. Once you map your chart of accounts, we’ll push journal entries for your pay runs into Saasu. For details please see our community article.
We’ve received some great early feedback:
My clients have been leading adopters of cloud-based services like Saasu. With PaymentEvolution I can now collaborate with my clients and their payroll needs while giving them true Canadian payroll support. – Keith Bogard, CEO of Azendit Financial Services
With PaymentEvolution Payroll you always get the best rules-based payroll processing service available:
- Payroll calculations effortlessly done for you
- True custom deductions, benefits and earnings – run your payroll the way you like
- Always up to date with full record keeping with beautiful reports
- A super employee site where they can get their full pay history and even tax information like T4 slips – all electronic!
- Seamless export of your payroll information into Saasu for bookkeeping purposes
If you haven’t tried Saasu yet, you can sign up for a 30 day free trial.
