Specialty contractors who utilize accounting platforms for their payroll process are missing out on critical time saving services. A vast majority of accounting platforms are shells into which you can enter rates and other information to calculate on. These platforms assume that you’re going to do active research on taxes, file taxes yourself, and manually enter data collected from employees. While the accounting portion of construction specific platforms provide amazing features that help streamline invoicing, job costing, and reporting, they fail at providing an efficient platform for contractors.
Stay Away from Managing Your Own Tax Rates
Any platform that allows you to set up your own local, state, or federal rates should be avoided. These platforms allow for an extreme amount of potential mistakes that could cost you and your employees thousands of dollars. Most modern online payroll platforms maintain the tax rates and tables for you, reducing the need for you to do research throughout the year. For large contractors, this means working in new localities no longer requires hours of yearly research. eBacon maintains a team whose entire responsibility is understanding and setting up tax rates. Since eBacon files taxes for you we need to make sure this is right.
You’re Responsible for Tax Payments
In construction-specific platforms, you are responsible for making tax payments and filing quarterly and annual statements. Not so much with most payroll platforms. Companies like eBacon do the filing and reconciliation for you. Your business is no longer responsible for making sure that payments happen immediately after payroll – that is the payroll company’s job. Your business no longer has to manually review 940/941s and other state forms – that’s our job. You owe it to yourself to move the busy work off yourself so that you can focus on the bigger picture items.
Employees Cannot Interact
A vast majority of the leading construction platforms are simply not cloud-based. Without an interface for employees to easily add time, get checks, or old documents, you become responsible for emailing and printing these documents. Cloud-based solutions like eBacon provide an employee login so that all of the employee self-service can be done for them and not by you.
While construction accounting platforms provide unbelievable value for your business, your business should not strategically sacrifice time saving benefits just to have everything in an antiquated desktop interface.
The material presented here is educational in nature and is not intended to be, nor should be relied upon, as legal or financial advice. Please consult with an attorney or financial professional for advice.
