As an accounting professional, the systems and processes you build to keep your firm running smoothly are crucial. And when accountants are departing the industry at lightning speed, the workload is only becoming heavier for their remaining peers.
For firms offering bookkeeping services to their clients, one of these key processes is payroll. Often tedious and complicated, the payroll service is critically important, especially for small business owners.
Here is a list of payroll workflow templates you can use to save time, streamline your processes, reduce manual inputs, and drive more client value.
You can directly download these as Microsoft Excel templates from the Karbon Template Library, or you can add them straight to Karbon. If you’re not already a Karbon customer, you’ll have the opportunity to start a free trial with your chosen template added.
What is a payroll template?
A payroll template is a standardized workflow designed to ensure the entire payroll process is completed on time, error-free, and consistently.
Payroll workflow templates will ensure you collect and process the following information:
Payroll deductions, tax withholdings, social security, and other mandatory contributions.
Net pay: Final amount of pay each employee receives after deductions, plus payslips, paystubs, and other information.
Other payroll information: Reimbursements, payroll costs, payroll reports, and other payroll data relevant to your clients’ business needs.
Why are payroll templates necessary?
Without a standardized way to complete your clients’ payroll processes, you can never truly measure and improve your team’s productivity in this area of your service delivery.
Not only that, but without payroll templates, tasks slip through the cracks, communication is difficult, and deadlines are missed.
Payroll templates ensure:
Efficiency
Consistency and compliance
Accurate tax deductions and PTO calculations
And when your payroll templates utilize workflow automation, time savings translate into tangible results.
Your payroll management stresses will reduce with this payroll processing template
It includes tasks for your clients to provide payroll timesheets, steps for you to process new employees, rate changes and time off requests, and reminders for processing payroll and following up with your clients.
It can be adapted to manage weekly, biweekly, or monthly payroll.
Best practice workflow for setting up employee payroll in your chosen payroll software
Regional Payroll Setup templates
Find the right payroll setup template for your firm. These work templates use an automatic client email task to get the initial details from your client to start the setup process.
A preview of the Setting up a New Employee in Gusto template in Karbon
Wagepoint Payroll Processing template
This is a best practice process for handling payroll using Wagepoint. It should be used alongside Wagepoint to complete payroll for both salaried and hourly employees.
The Wagepoint Payroll Processing template helps you collect information like gross pay, hourly rates, employee name details, and other details required for payroll needs
This is a best practice process for monthly accounting, including monthly bookkeeping essentials and month-end close processes.
👇 Download it for free
This template helps maintain accurate records of clients’ financial transactions, expenses, and income on a monthly basis.
It leverages Karbon’s Automators and Client Requests to help prepare, reconcile, review, and follow up with your clients about their monthly accounting information.
This is a best practice process for year-end reviews. It assumes month-end close work has been completed previously, and doesn't include the completion of any tax work.
👇 Download it for free
Manage your year-end reviews with a dedicated and templated process
If you’re partnering with a CPA firm to manage year-end tax work, there is an additional section at the end to manage that interaction.
If not (or if you're doing it internally), you can remove the last section from the template. If you use the template in Karbon, you can add an Automator to the last section to mark the work completed once the tasks in the section are done.
Weekly Reconciliation template
This is a best practice process for weekly reconciliation (a sub-process of monthly bookkeeping).
It includes tasks for preparing accounts payable and expenses, bill pay, bank account reconciliation, credit card reconciliation, and client communication.
👇 Download it for free
If you use this template in Karbon, once it’s set up and personalized, you can set it to repeat on an automatic weekly recurring schedule.
The Karbon Template Library houses over 250 workflow templates that are tailored to your region and service, sorted into common collections and workflow packs, like this Accounting Firm Starter Templates Collection. They're all ready to download and start using instantly.
Karbon templates include customizable statuses, checklists, workflow automation, job roles and work types. These allow you to document workflows to suit your firm, giving your staff the tools to set up detailed projects in seconds.
If you’re a Karbon customer, choose any template from the Karbon Template Library and have it instantly added to your account with one click. Complete with automators, client tasks, job roles, statuses, and all the other Karbon workflow functionality you’re used to.
If you don’t use Karbon yet, you can start a trial instantly with your chosen template added.
Or, if you’re not quite ready or want to use a different system, you don’t miss out. All templates are available to download as Excel spreadsheets to upload to Google Sheets or PDF process maps to use however you want.
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Bookkeeping cleanup can be routine or an emergency. Both can be handled by getting organized, improving communication with clients, and automating tasks.
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