Payroll ensures correct salary being paid out to every employee on rolls of your organization, so you have to do everything to avoid any issues or problems related to it. When it comes to your payroll, you must stay organized and you can do this by having an effective payroll template for your company.
Contents
Payroll Templates
What is a payroll worksheet?
If you have done payroll management tasks in your workplace, then you should know what a payroll template looks like. This is a document where you calculate your employees’ salaries. The presence of this document makes life easier for payroll management. It also can help you avoid problems related to employee salaries.
Payroll management is a very crucial task as you always have to remain organized to guarantee the accurate salary status of all of your employees. To achieve this, you need to come up with a worksheet for your payroll so that your company’s salaries will be in order. If this is your first time to create this document, you can use a template.
Payroll Worksheets
Tips for creating your payroll worksheet
One of the fastest and easiest ways for businesses to standardize the payroll process is through the use of a payroll template. The pre-formatting feature along with the automatic calculation of this template can save you a lot of effort and time in payroll processing.
At the same time, it allows you to make adjustments based on the needs of your company. What information you should include in your template might raise questions or concerns about your payroll procedures, especially if you are just starting with a new business. Here are examples of questions to ask yourself:
- Will you allow your employees to take comp time?
- What are the policies of your company in terms of overtime?
- How will your employees document their travel time and other official duties that you will consider “off-the-clock?”
It is very important to establish policies first before training your employees or creating your payroll worksheet. Then when it’s time for you to make a template of your own, here are some tips to guide you:
- Accuracy
After you have made adjustments on your template to suit your needs, you will have to double-check all of the information to make sure that you haven’t left out anything. Since templates are a lot easier for you to use and for your employees to understand, keep things simple and accurate by including only the parts where you can enter the relevant information. - Efficiency
When choosing your template, make sure that it supports your workflow. As such, its use can increase efficiency while saving you money and time. - Customization
You can use a template for a variety of settings although they are most useful to smaller businesses that don’t require complex systems for payroll management. But even small businesses can still vary depending on location, size, and industry.
For this, you can adjust the template you download to fit your specific needs or situation. A template will provide you with a structure to adjust as your business evolves over time.
How do I create a payroll salary?
Payday is a very important day for all of your employees. It is, therefore, essential to provide salaries on time as this maintains the performance and morale of your workers. It is also as important to accurately calculate taxes and pay. It could be very frustrating for employees when you make mistakes on their paychecks.
Small businesses sometimes depend on an outside bookkeeper or accountant to use the payroll template and process salaries but doing this when you have many employees can significantly reduce your earnings. This means that whether you have a lot of employees or only a few, you can save money by processing and calculating your own payroll.
If you are in possession of the basic payroll information, you can use an application like Excel to make your payroll spreadsheet. Excel has the features you need to calculate how much to pay your workers and how much you should remit to the government for taxes and withholding.
Payroll Spreadsheets
How do I do payroll in Excel?
You can efficiently do payroll with Excel by using a standard payroll template to use each month. You should create tabs for every month that you link with formulas to calculate and total your employees’ deductions, pay, and taxes.
In addition, you also must have a setup tab where your payroll calculations can pull basic information. Here are the steps to create your payroll register template in Excel:
- Create the basic format
This involves the creation of headings for the columns and rows that you need. - Set-up the payroll information for each of your employees
After creating the template layout, you can start setting up the information of your employees. This includes their names, pay rates per hour or yearly salary, and how many pay periods they have a year. - Set-up the tax information of your employer payroll
Aside from keeping track of withholdings from your employee’s paychecks, you also have to pay your share of taxes as the employer. Create an “Employer Payroll Taxes” tab with cells that you will use to input state and federal unemployment tax rates. - Enter the number of hours worked
After you have entered all of the required data, you are now ready to run your first set of calculations. For this, click on the corresponding payroll tab for the month and input the pay date. Then enter your employees’ names. Finally, input how many hours they have worked. - Review your spreadsheet’s automatic payroll calculations
After completing the initial setup and inputting the work hours of your employees, all payroll calculations must become visible. It is always good practice to review these before you pay your employees.
This way, there will be a very minimal chance of reissuing or voiding payments later. Also, remember that your payroll tax calculations’ accuracy will depend on the accuracy of the information on your employee payroll. This means that you have to be very careful if you don’t want to incur penalties. - Pay your employees
After you have made a review of your payroll deduction, wage, and tax calculations for the current pay period, you are now ready to release your employees’ salaries. You can do this in one of several ways. You can print checks online, deposit money to their accounts or work with your bank to arrange direct deposits.