How Long Should You Keep Payroll Records?

Keeping a record of your payroll serves several important purposes, and in some cases, it is required by law. Additionally, how you manage and store payroll records is important, and some industries have specific requirements regarding the secure storage of payroll records. This is sometimes the case with government-related accounts, but other sensitive industries are affected as well.

Why Should You Keep Payroll Records?

Having the ability to recall payroll records is crucial for legal protection. If an employee determines at some point in the future that they believe improper payment from the past was issued for their services, you may need to provide documentation to prove that the employee was compensated according to their contract.

Also, if tax issues come up in the future, you may need to utilize a bookkeeping payroll tool to pull archived information to demonstrate that taxes were paid properly. In most cases, you’ll need to keep tax records related to payroll for a minimum of seven years.

Your bookkeeping can also benefit from keeping payroll records. If an accounting error is caught in the future, you may need to unravel a trail of paychecks to catch exactly where the problem stemmed from. This can save you time, money, and a lot of headaches when trying to solve complicated matters related to tax, benefits, deductions, and your overall accounting.

The Fair Labor Standards Act

Regardless of your industry, the Fair Labor Standards Act requires that all business owners retain payroll records for two years. To ensure that you remain in compliance with these regulations, it’s recommended that you utilize an automated bookkeeping payroll tool.

These kinds of tools will generally provide you with date information for your payroll records so that you can look through your archive and ensure that your records comply. This can also help you if you need to find specific records fast to produce them for employees, ex-employees, court cases, and the Internal Revenue Service.

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Do Corporate Cards Affect My Credit Score?

Corporate credit cards offer a way for employees of your business to make business purchases quickly and easily. Many business owners automatically issue corporate cards to employees during the onboarding process, but others only issue these cards to various employees in specific departments. Likewise, you may automatically issue corporate cards when an employee or team will be going out of town for business and then suspend the use of these cards upon return.

The Benefits of Corporate Credit Cards

One of the nice things about allowing your employees to use corporate cards is that it gives them the ability to make purchases for the business without needing to seek reimbursement later. It also allows your business to track expenses more easily through online access and online activity review.

These cards can also be used when traveling or when taking customers, leads, and prospects out for lunch or dinner. This alleviates the need to worry about paying upfront for these expenses and then having to submit receipts.

How Corporate Credit Cards Affect Personal Credit

In some cases, a corporate credit card will not affect your credit score. This is usually the case when you are simply provided with the card to use with the company’s authorization. This is different than being listed as an authorized user.

If you are listed as an authorized user of a card, this means that your name and credit history may be associated with the use of the card. Even though the company is still the entity listed as the card owner and is therefore responsible for making payments, your name is linked directly to the card. If your employer fails to make payments, this may reflect poorly on your credit score.

Also, if the card is issued to the company in your name, the card activity may reflect on your credit score. Some corporate cards are issued as a batch whereby the account belongs to the employer, but each card is individually issued. In this scenario, your credit score may be affected.

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What to Know Before Starting a Nonprofit

Starting a nonprofit is often one of the best ways to get into the world of business without having to deal with the consumerism and profit-chasing that comes from starting a traditional company. Many nonprofit organizations are created to give back to the community, and starting a nonprofit can provide a meaningful income while focusing your skills and talents on helping others.

As altruistic as a nonprofit venture can be, there are still a lot of planning and managing tasks that take place in order to find success. If you’re considering starting a nonprofit for the first time, below are some things to think about:

Taking Care of Payroll

Even though your organization is not seeking to earn a profit, financial management concerns like payroll still need to be dealt with. Payroll for nonprofits works much like payroll for traditional business management; however, there may be certain tax regulations and reporting requirements that need to be factored in.

This is why many nonprofit managers opt to work with accountants and human resources software that specialize in payroll for nonprofits. There are software suites out there designed specifically for nonprofit financial management, but many traditional HR and payroll software solutions include nonprofit organization features. These resources can take the hassle out of adhering to regulations while also ensuring that your organization members get paid.

Maintaining Records

Speaking of regulations, your nonprofit will likely be subject to a number of federal and state regulations, particularly when it comes to documenting the organization’s activities. Keeping up with, storing and filing the right paperwork can be challenging, so you might consider partnering with a document management solutions provider for help.

These types of companies can handle all of the important and difficult tasks of routing documents, backing up important files, providing copies of documents upon request and more. Everything from your organization’s mission statement to its payroll to its income will need to be documented and preserved for tax reporting purposes as well as to remain in regulatory compliance with various governing bodies.

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Best Practices for Keeping Your Company Secure While Working Remotely

Remote work is more accessible than ever these days, and employers are more open to the idea of employees working from home than ever before. While work-from-home (WFH) opportunities provide plenty of benefits for both businesses and employees, they unfortunately come with some downsides.

In particular, the potential for security risks is a big concern in remote work. Stolen identities, unauthorized data access and vulnerable financial records are enough to keep any data security professional up at night. Thankfully, there are some steps you can take to protect your business even when employees work remotely.

Utilize Identity Management Tools

Identity management is the process of ensuring that only authorized employees have access to sensitive data. In most cases, identity management for WFH employees who deal with sensitive data is handled by an IT security team since the digital realm is most likely to be affected by security threats these days.

A business owner may choose to deploy identity management for WFH employees to deter threats that can’t be controlled on-site. This is especially important in the modern age of ransomware attacks, financial hacking and identity theft. With a system in place, even remote employees can verify their identities prior to accessing data, and detailed reports can be generated documenting who had access to what data at which location at a specific time.

Provide Security Training

Just because your employees are working remotely doesn’t mean that you can’t still provide regular training on security risks. Consider creating webinars that discuss common threats employees may face, including phishing scams and email spoofing. Employees can access this training from home on a scheduled basis or when it’s convenient, and you can feel better knowing that your business is protected.

If you choose to provide training, make sure that it is ongoing and updated. Security threats change constantly, and criminals are always looking for new ways to access sensitive data. Work with your IT security team to evaluate current threats and plan for emerging threats as these will need to be entered into consideration for future training sessions.

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How Manufacturing Businesses Can Stay Compliant With Labor Laws?

Compliance with labor laws protects your employees, customers, and business by ensuring that you can operate safely and respectfully. If you’re worried that your company may not be compliant, you may ultimately face financial hardships, legal problems, reputational risks and more if you choose to do nothing about it.

Fortunately, there are manufacturing labor compliance solutions that can help you get compliant with labor laws. These automated solutions can help you prevent payroll errors, maintain accurate records, create compliance checklists and more!

To get started right away, here are the basic steps you should take to ensure that your manufacturing business is compliant with federal and state labor laws.

Create a corporate compliance program

Once you have done adequate research and understand the legal and industry regulatory standards you should be following, you can set goals for your business and assemble a team to establish a corporate manufacturing compliance program.

Assess risks within your organization

If you are creating a compliance program from scratch, you’ll first need to understand your organization’s risk. This will require that you complete a risk analysis to identify areas of weakness.

Address vulnerable areas

Next, you’ll want to address those risks to ensure your company can comply with the relevant agencies. In some instances, this may require a simple and easy solution. In others, the solution may be a complete overhaul of processes. Don’t be afraid to make big changes when necessary. If that’s what it takes to remain compliant with labor laws, it’s well worth the effort to get it done.

Provide compliance training to employees

Provide your staff with manufacturing compliance training to ensure that your newly-created processes are maintained. Without this training, all your hard work will be undone and it will be difficult (if not impossible) to maintain ongoing compliance. You can use manufacturing labor compliance solutions to automatically assign compliance training to employees at the right time.

Many of these tasks and processes can be simplified with the right compliance solution. Make sure to shop around for manufacturing labor compliance solutions before you start creating your compliance program. It will save you quite a bit of time and ensure that the process goes smoothly.

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Shift Differential Pay and Labor Law Compliance

Not surprisingly, holidays, weekends, and late nights are not the most popular working hours for employees. As a result, some employers offer shift differential pay, which provides workers with an incentive to pick up those undesirable hours. In turn, this also helps businesses maintain staffing around the clock when needed.

So how does a shift differential work and what do employers need to do to ensure they are compliant with federal and state labor laws? Let’s explore these questions further.

How does a shift differential work?

Essentially, an employer may offer shift differential pay, which is extra compensation for working undesirable shifts. For example, an employer may pay higher wages to employees that work on Christmas or that agree to work graveyard shifts overnight. The law does not require that employers offer this additional compensation, but it does help companies retain employees.

Although the employee will receive extra compensation for this work, the employer determines the rate at which the worker is paid. However, they may be willing to negotiate with the employee, depending on the company and the circumstances.

Fair Labor Standards Act and shift differentials

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is a piece of federal legislation that dictates rules for employee’s payment. However, it does not require business owners to provide shift differential pay for less desirable shifts. Employers may still choose to do so, but their premium pay rules and policies must still comply with minimum wage and overtime laws outlined by the FLSA.

Additionally, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. That means they have to offer shift differential pay to all workers. However, federal law does not require that employers offer differential pay to all employees working the same shift. For example, an employer might use differential pay to entice an employee to work a shift that he or she does not typically work.

Calculating shift differential

Calculating shift differential isn’t difficult, but to reduce human error, it is best done with an HR compliance and payroll solution that will automatically double check your work for you. Regardless, manually calculating shift differential can be achieved by completing the following steps:

• Determine the percentage of regular pay that is earned for working an off shift.
• Multiply the percentage by the employee’s hourly wage to figure out differential pay.
• Add the differential pay to the hourly wage to determine the total wages earned each hour during the employee’s shift.

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How Can HRIS Contribute to a Business?

Most businesses, big or small, can benefit from a human resource information system, or HRIS. An HRIS makes it much easier to manage all facets of the human resources department. Many small businesses especially think that the cost of an HRIS might not be worth it. This couldn't be further from the truth. In this blog, we’ll outline why an HRIS for small business can make a huge contribution.

Help Employees Help Themselves

Your HR department doesn’t have time to be answering employee questions all day. With HRIS for small business solutions, your employees will get access to an employee portal that can answer most, if not all, of their questions. They can view their payroll, benefits, request vacation, download tax forms and more. This saves time for both the employee and the HR rep.

Automate Your HR Department

Many businesses think automating means that the need for an employee will be eliminated. Automation is more of a tool to enable better work than a replacement for human input. With an HRIS platform, the most tedious HR tasks can be automated so your HR team can focus on strategic work that matters more.

Help Employees Communicate

Emails, Slack and other communication platforms can cause employees to lose information and communications in the shuffle. Switching between communication apps constantly is not only a pain, but it also takes time out of the day. With an HRIS platform, all communications can be accessed from a central hub, connecting everyone like never before.

Analytics

An HRIS can also collect data and analytics about your business. These actionable insights allow you to see how your company is performing and where it could do better. Valuable data is hard to come by, but a good HRIS can compile this data for you and make it easily readable and parseable.

Choosing an HRIS for Small Business

If an HRIS for small business sounds like the perfect solution, be sure to find a platform that fits with your business. An HRIS platform can give you the tools you need to help your business grow, so make sure you also seek one out that gives you the ability to scale your platform with your business.

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