Many business owners feel that they can pay their employes “whenever” they want and that is true to a point. Business owners can pay their employees whenever they want as long as the “whenever” meets the laws of the state their business resides in.
As a business owner you probably feel “in control” when it comes to setting a payroll schedule for the people you hire. Certainly you have options, you can issue payroll on a:
- weekly
- bi-weekly {every other week}
- semi-monthly {twice a month, perhaps on the 1st and the 15th}
- or a monthly basis
While there is no federal laws that require how often you pay your employees, the payroll schedule you choose MUST conform to the requirements of the state that your business is located in.
Most states require that every employer has to pay all of the wages due to an employee on a regular payroll schedule, which is determined by you the business owner – BUT you must notify the employees of how frequently you intend to pay them. A “regular schedule” means that you must consistently pay your employees using whatever frequency you choose, in other words you can’t just randomly issue a payroll check.
Many states also tell a business owner how much of a “holdback” they can take. Meaning that if you decide your workweek starts on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday and that you will pay your employees on the Friday AFTER the end of the work week; you are holding back a week’s worth of pay.
A word of caution – a business can get into trouble if it doesn’t pay it’s employees as often as the law requires – and I’m sure you don’t want or need that additional headache! Believe it or not, but each state has their own set of rules and regulations {imagine that!}, in some states the rules are different depending upon the employees occupation. In other words, setting a payroll schedule that is realistic for your company AND that conforms to state requirements can be a mess!
The U.S. Department of Labor provides a fairly detailed overview of employee payroll schedules by state, you can find State Payday Requirements here, the information provided is ONLY an overview of general information – you should most definitely contact your state department of labor for all of the details!
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This QuickBooks payroll tip discusses underpaying employee wages and wage restitution, after paychecks have been created and cashed.
Paying your employees the correct rate of pay is one of the most critical portions of your business; and if those employees are subject to multiple pay rate or have frequent pay rate changes, ensuring that everyone is being paid the correct rate can be a tedious and potentially error prone process.
In today’s busy workplace, business owners and payroll administrators are faced with numerous challenges which sometimes result in employee wage underpayments. Often times a wage shortage isn’t discovered until after paychecks have been created and cashed; which then requires wage restitution to the employee.
Quite often this situation puts the business owner or payroll clerk in a quandary about how to best record employee wage restitution, especially if the employees are performing work on a prevailing wage job and they must document the wage adjustment on the certified payroll reports and resubmit the reports. Clearly documenting employee wage restitution is crucial, and can be accomplished in three fairly easy steps.
3 steps to documenting employee wage restitution/payment:
- In the QuickBooks Payroll Item List, create a new Hourly Wage Payroll item and name it Wage Restitution
- Edit the records of employees who were affected by the wage underpayment, add the adjustment payroll item to the Payroll & Compensation Info tab, with the appropriate rate of pay (the difference between what they should have been paid and what they were paid)
- Issue a separate paycheck, using the QuickBooks Unscheduled Payroll option, use the adjustment payroll item and enter the number of applicable hours*
*Important Note:
The best way to document a wage restitution on a certified payroll report is to display each employee twice on the report; once displaying the rate that he (she) was originally paid and a second time displaying the hourly rate of the wage adjustment. Clearly indicate that you are submitting a corrected report by writing, in large letters, CORRECTED and highlight it using a highlighter.
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Wage underpayments can often times be caused simply because in QuickBooks there is not an automated means of updating the pay rates of all employees at once. Wage Manager Solution, a QuickBooks integrated application, not only allows you to change the pay rates for all of your employees at once, it will also allow you to create new payroll wage items, assign it to multiple employees AND add a rate of pay….all at the same time.
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Watch a brief (10 minute) video about how Wage Manager Solution works and download a Free Trial.
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The benefits of paying the Prevailing Wage Fringe Benefit portion to bona-fide plan is often misunderstood by employers and employees alike.
Prevailing wage jobs, those jobs that are subject to the Davis-Bacon Act and/or State Prevailing Wage Laws, require that all laborers and mechanics {including tradesmen such as carpenters, equipment operators, painters, pipefitters, plumbers, etc.) who perform work on the jobsite are to be paid a set base rate of pay PLUS an hourly fringe benefit rate.
Union contractors automatically pay the total hourly fringe benefit rate to the union hall on behalf of the employee, usually splitting the full hourly rate into specific “funds” – Health & Welfare, Pension, Vacation, etc. When this happens the Union contractor doesn’t pay payroll taxes, worker’s compensation, or general liability insurance on this amount.
Non-Union contractors, on the other hand, can pay the fringe benefit rate to the employee in addition to the stated base rate of pay OR they can pay it into a bona-fide plan on behalf of the employee.
We’ll look at the differences and discuss the benefits to both employees and employers.
In the following examples we’ll be working with a base rate of $41.51, fringe rate of $18.72, a Worker’s Comp experience rate of $10.70 per hundred dollars in wages, and a General Liability Insurance Experience rate of $0.636 per hundred dollars in wages and a standard 40 hour work week.
When the fringes are paid in cash – included in the employees base rate of pay
As an employee you are paid $60.23 per hour ($41.51 + 18.72) x 40 hours = $2,409.20 gross with a net of $1,512.38. As an employee you are paying $896.82 in taxes – see sample paycheck below:
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As an employer you pay $560.99 in payroll taxes, worker’s comp and general liability insurance in addition to the $2,409.20 gross wages for a total of $2,970.19 to have the employee on the jobsite for 40 hours.
When the fringes are paid to a bona-fide plan on behalf of the employee
As an employee you are paid $41.51 per hour x 40 hours = $1,660.40 gross with a net of $1,101.47 PLUS $748.80 is contributed to the bona-fide plan on your behalf for a total of $1,850.27. As an employee you are paying $558.93 in taxes {in reality that is a savings of $337.89 in taxes) – see sample paycheck below:
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As an employer you pay $1,135.96 in bona-fide plan contributions, payroll taxes, worker’s comp and general liability insurance in addition to the $1660.40 in gross wages for a total of $2,795.86 to have the employee on the jobsite for 40 hours – that’s a savings of $174.33.
Many employers and employees are rightfully cautious about the cost of setting up a bona-fide plan. Many times setting up a traditional 401(k) or 403(b) plan is costly (one customer recently told me that it would cost them $5,000.00 to initially set up the plan) and then the employees must wait until legal retirement age before being able to start withdrawing the money.
The Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Plan (SUB Plan) offered by Prevailing Wage Contractors Association (PWCA) has a start up cost to the employer of $200.00; and provides employees access to the money when they need it most – when they are not working or have missed some time. The SUB Plan can be used to pay an employee when he has a short work period; which is defined as working less than 40 hour in a week or less than 173 hours in a month. Short work periods can be caused by layoffs, bad weather, illness, lack of work, equipment down time or any number of reasons.
For additional information about the SUB Plan offered by PWCA, visit their website – or contact Nancy Smyth.
Is your company short on cash and wondering which bill to pay first? That bill should be your payroll taxes!
At one point or another, every business is going to be short on cash and will be faced with the challenge of figuring out which bill they should pay first. The first bill that you absolutely have to pay first is your is your payroll tax bill – otherwise it is going to cost you dearly in the long run!
Below is a real example, taken from the March edition of The General Ledger, a monthly newsletter from the American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers.
To deal with its financial problems T Corporation decided to pay several creditors, putting off for two quarters paying employment (payroll) taxes and filing related returns. T Corporation finally paid the taxes and over $30,000.00 in penalties and interest, then asked for a refund of the penalties, claiming that it had been “teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.”
The case then went to court and the IRS won.
An employer must pay federal employment taxes when it has the cash flow to make the payments. Spending the money for other purposes is considered to be “willful failure” to pay taxes.
If necessary, a taxpayer must make an effort to borrow the funds or delay payment of loans or obligations so it can pay the taxes. Failure to pay employment taxes may be excused when payment would cause “undue hardship,” defined as a substantial financial loss, such as losing business or contracts, facing actions against the company by creditors that would damage the business, or having to sell property at a sacrifice price to pay the taxes by the due date.
But T Corporation provided no proof of any hardship(s).
Moral of the story — pay your payroll taxes; if you can’t contact your tax advisor for help in working with the IRS to delay payment AND be prepared to show proof. Don’t just make the decision to not pay them or pay them late; it is too costly in the long run.
Setting up and tracking Union Fringe Benefits in QuickBooks can be a fairly straightforward task, after all Union Fringes are just a specified hourly dollar amount that the company pays to the Union on behalf of the employee.
Union fringes often consist of contributions to Vacation/Holiday, Health & Welfare, Pension, Training, and sometimes Travel & Subsistence, Savings, or Fund Administration. Depending upon the Union that you are dealing with, some of the fringe benefits could be subject to payroll taxes, while others are not.
Most of the time fringes are calculated and paid based on the number of hours the employee works on the jobsite, occasionally, however, they are a based on a percentage of gross pay.
Regardless of how they are paid (based on an hourly amount or a percentage of gross) or if they are taxable or not; in QuickBooks, each of these specific types of hourly fringe benefits should be set up in the Payroll Item List as Company Contribution items.
Now that you know some basic information about Union Fringe Benefits and how you would track them in QuickBooks, let’s take it a step further and explore some of the more complex issues.
Not every employee will have the same fringe benefit package or the same fringe benefit rates. This is where it becomes more complex. So before you begin setting things up in QuickBooks; take the time to plan things out and ask yourself these questions:
- Do my employees ALWAYS perform work under the same Work Classification/pay rate/fringe rate combination?
- Is the Work Classification/pay rate/fringe rate combination the same for all the jobs that employees work on?
- Is the Work Classification/pay rate/fringe rate combination the same for each of our employees?
Below are basic setup instructions if ALL of your employees fall under a single Work Classification/pay rate/fringe rate combination, nothing changes from job to job. In QuickBooks:
- You create company contribution items for each specific fringe benefit.
- Check the “Track expenses by job” option in the item setup.
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- Create or choose the Union from the Vendor List.
- Assign appropriate Payroll Liabilities account, personally I like to create a Sub-Item of Payroll Liabilities called Union Fringes, and then create Sub-Items under that for each fringe item – it just makes it easy to see what your liability for each fringe item is at any given time.
- Assign the appropriate Expense or Cost of Goods Sold Account to record the company payments; personally I like to create a Sub-Account of Cost of Goods Sold called Union Fringes.
- Choose the applicable Tax Tracking Type, based on the information you’ve received from the Union Hall.
- If a specific fringe benefit is subject to payroll taxes, check which taxes are to be calculated on the Taxes window
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- Select how the calculations are to be be performed. If the fringe rate is paid on all straight time and overtime hours worked, choose “Calculate this item based on hours”.
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- Enter the hourly rate for the benefit item and make sure that the Annual Limit option is NOT checked (by default QuickBooks always has this option selected.
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- Edit employee records and add the fringe benefit company contribution items to the Payroll & Compensation Information tab in the Additions, Deductions and Company Contributions section.
- When you create paychecks, QuickBooks automatically calculates the amounts for each employee.
Use the instructions above as a guideline for your QuickBooks setup.
