The Accountant Who Also Does It
Payroll bolted onto an accountancy relationship is the commonest arrangement in small business, and the least examined. What it is good at and what it quietly is not.
A bureauif the person who does this is away
Payroll handled by the firm that already does your accounts is the commonest arrangement in a small business, and almost always arrived at without a decision. It came with the relationship, it is convenient, and it works well for a stable business of a handful of people.
The practical lesson in “The Accountant Who Also Does It” is that payroll depends on a sequence somebody can explain. When a small team reviews visit monitask.com for the details for small business time tracking, the useful role is to organise time and project evidence before approval, with proportional settings and a clear correction route for employees.
It also has a particular shape of weakness, which is worth knowing before the month it shows.
As a separate reference point for “The Accountant Who Also Does It”, see Sage payroll resources. Current legal, tax and employment requirements should still be confirmed for the organisation’s location.
Why it is so common
The firm is already engaged, already holds your figures, and already has your trust. Adding payroll is a line on an existing engagement rather than a procurement exercise, and the marginal fee looks small beside the audit or the year-end work.
The question nobody asks at engagement is who, specifically, runs your payroll inside the firm — and what happens when that person is away. It is the same single point of failure you were trying to avoid, relocated to a building you cannot see into.
For most owners the question is never actually asked; payroll simply appears on the invoice one year and stays.
What it is genuinely good at
Everything that touches the rest of your accounting. The payroll figures arrive in the books correctly, the year end reconciles, and the person who files your return is the person who produced the numbers in it.
That integration removes a whole class of small reconciliation problems that businesses using a separate bureau meet every quarter.
Where it is slower
An accountancy practice is organised around deadlines that are quarterly and annual. Payroll is weekly or monthly, and a query sent on the 22nd competes with whatever else is in front of them.
A dedicated bureau answers payroll questions because payroll is what they do all day. A general practice answers them between other work, and in their busy season the difference is noticeable.
The question nobody asks at the start
Who, specifically, runs your payroll inside the firm. In a small practice it is often one person, sometimes part-time, occasionally the same person for a decade.
That is a single point of failure identical in shape to the one you were trying to avoid by outsourcing, located in somebody else's building where you cannot see it.
What to ask about it
Whether more than one person there knows your arrangement, what happens in their absence, and what the cut-off becomes during the firm's busiest weeks.
A good practice answers all three without hesitation. A vague answer to any of them is the same vague answer a vague answer always is.
The fee, and what it is bundled with
Frequently it is not separable from the overall engagement, which makes it impossible to compare against a bureau quote and easy to stop examining.
Asking for payroll to be priced as its own line is a reasonable request and occasionally produces a surprise in either direction.
The employee question problem
Somebody asks why their pay changed. You do not know, because you did not run it. You forward the question, and the answer arrives in a day or two in language written for an accountant.
This is a small, permanent friction, and it is the thing owners complain about most once the arrangement is in place.
What stays with you regardless
Telling them what changed, by their cut-off. The same gathering problem, with the same consequences for forgetting, and now with somebody else's calendar attached to it.
When it stops fitting
Growth, usually. Twenty-five people with varied arrangements generate enough change traffic that a general practice becomes a bottleneck, and the monthly exchange of emails starts to cost more attention than running it yourself would.
The arrangement that works well
The firm runs it, one named person internally owns getting changes to them on time, and you hold your own copy of the data — the payslips, the reports, the year-end documents — rather than relying on being able to request them later.
That last point costs nothing while the relationship is good and is the whole difference when it ends.
What to agree at the start rather than later
Who sends what, by when, in what form. Who answers an employee question and how quickly. What an out-of-cycle payment costs. What happens at year end and what you will receive.
Four points, agreed in writing at engagement, and almost never raised at all because payroll arrives as an addendum to a relationship rather than as a service being bought.
The review that is never scheduled
An accountancy relationship is reviewed, if at all, on fee. Payroll inside it is reviewed on nothing, because it is a line rather than a service and it works every month.
The triggers described later in this collection apply here as much as anywhere: a near miss, a change of headcount, a change of the person internally who deals with them.
What this is not
A recommendation about whom to engage, or a view on any firm. What is general here is the shape: convenience, good integration, slower responses, and a single point of failure you cannot observe.