The Payroll Process

Mistake-free payroll starts here

Think of this as your small business payroll guide! Every month, we help thousands of businesses like yours calculate their pay runs, pay their employees, and process IRS tax filings.

While we offer payroll software that makes it easy and affordable to offload these responsibilities, we know lots of you choose to go it alone. We were once a small business ourselves, so we admire your DIY spirit. At the same time, we know what it’s like to be up in the middle of the night trying to solve a payroll problem: You’re not alone (even if it feels like it sometimes).

Payroll tutorials, guides, articles and more

In this resource center, you’ll find articles and tutorials that detail every step of the payroll process — and we try to make sure they don’t sound like they were written by the IRS.

You’ll also find lists of important deadlines and detailed explanations about tricky concepts like net pay vs. gross pay or figuring out whether someone on your payroll is technically an employee who you need to withhold taxes from.

Outlining the payroll process

We’ll carefully walk you through each of the major steps of the payroll process with clear examples. Running payroll is ultimately the task of converting your employees’ and contractors’ gross pay (or the total of all the money they earn) into the net pay in their paycheck by removing withholdings and deductions for taxes and other expenses your employees incur. Then you must remit and report those taxes to state and local authorities.

Here’s what goes into it, step by step, plus links to more detailed information:

State tax calculators

If you’re having a hard time finding local information, we also pulled together a detailed list of state tax agencies, tax rates, and free calculators to help you with the math:

Dive into the payroll particulars

It may not exactly be fun, but processing payroll doesn’t have to be painful, either. If you ever encounter a problem or need more help, we’ll always be here. We do all the math, pay your employees, and file payroll taxes for a low monthly fee. We’ll even talk to the IRS if something ever goes wrong.

But if you’re doing things yourself (like 40% of small business owners), you can probably find answers to all your payroll questions here. Good luck with payroll (and everything else), and let us know if you ever need any help with the process!