Payroll and bookkeeping services for small business, posted properly into your books

For us it covers the full cycle, not only the pay run. Before each pay date we collect the changes: new starters, leavers, hours, overtime, bonuses, unpaid leave and salary changes. We prepare the run in your payroll platform and hand you a gross-to-net summary per employee to approve before anything is released. Payslips go out through the platform on the date agreed.

We then record employer costs and the statutory deductions withheld, and post the payroll journal into your general ledger so wage cost lands in the profit and loss account and everything still owed sits as a liability on the balance sheet. At month-end we reconcile the wage control account and the tax liability accounts against what actually left the bank, and tell you what is still outstanding and why.

What it does not include is statutory filing in your jurisdiction. That stays with your local payroll agent or bureau, and we work with them directly.

No, and we would rather say so on this page than have you find out in month three. Statutory payroll filing is handled by your local payroll agent, your CPA or the bureau built into your payroll platform. That covers federal and state returns and deposits in the United States, real-time submissions to HMRC in the United Kingdom, source deduction remittances to the CRA in Canada, and Single Touch Payroll reporting to the ATO in Australia.

Those obligations are registration-based and jurisdiction-specific. We are not registered as a filing agent in any of these countries, so we do not submit on your behalf.

What we do is everything either side of the filing: prepare the run, get the numbers right, produce the figures your filing agent needs, and then prove that what was filed and what was paid both reconcile back to your books. We speak to your agent directly so you are not the messenger between two sets of numbers.

A payroll or wage control account is the holding account between your payroll system and your general ledger. The journal debits gross wages and employer costs to expense, credits net pay owed to employees, and credits taxes and other deductions owed to the authorities. As each payment leaves the bank it clears the matching liability. Once everything for that period has been paid, the control account should be zero, or should hold only what is genuinely still owed at that date.

When it never clears, three numbers are wrong at once. Wage cost in the profit and loss account is wrong, because something was posted to expense that was not a cost, or a real cost was never posted at all. The liabilities on the balance sheet are wrong, because a balance is sitting there that either should have cleared or should never have existed. And because the profit and loss account feeds retained earnings, net profit is wrong too.

A growing control balance is not cosmetic. It is the ledger telling you it cannot reconcile payroll to the bank.

Three ways, and the right one depends on your setup. If you run payroll inside QuickBooks Online or Xero Payroll, the journal posts automatically, but only to whatever accounts were mapped at setup, and that mapping is very often wrong or has never been reviewed. If you run payroll in a separate platform such as Gusto, there is usually an integration that pushes a summary journal across. If there is no integration, or it posts at the wrong level of detail, we post a manual journal each period straight from the payroll register.

In every case we check the same things: gross pay and employer costs on the right expense lines, net pay credited to the control account rather than straight to wages expense, each deduction sitting in its own liability account, and the journal total agreeing to the payroll report to the cent. Then we match the bank payments against those liabilities.

An automatic posting is not the same as a correct posting, and the difference usually only surfaces at year-end. If you are still choosing between the two platforms, our QuickBooks and Xero comparison covers how each handles payroll posting.

No. We do not hold client money and we do not release payments. You keep the payment step, which is the safest arrangement for both of us. What we do is prepare the run, check it, and hand you an approval: a gross-to-net summary per employee, the total to be paid, and the amounts to be held back for taxes and deductions.

You approve inside your own payroll platform or your banking portal, and the audit trail of who authorised what stays with you. If your payroll platform debits your account automatically on a schedule, we make sure the funding date, the amount and the ledger entry all agree, and we flag anything that looks wrong before the debit lands rather than after.

We also never ask for your online banking passwords. Any bookkeeper who does is asking you to break your own bank's terms, and you should decline.

We work directly in QuickBooks Payroll and Xero Payroll. If your payroll runs somewhere else, such as Gusto or a bureau your accountant already uses in the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia, we work from the payroll registers and journal reports it produces and reconcile what it posts into QuickBooks Online or Xero. Whether we also prepare runs inside that platform is something we confirm for your setup on the review call, not something we promise on a web page.

We do not insist that you move. Changing payroll platform mid-year means migrating year-to-date figures, and that is a real project with real risk, not a switch. If the platform you are on genuinely cannot do what your business needs, we will say so and tell you what the move costs in time and disruption. If it can, we will work with it.

What matters is not which platform you run. It is whether the numbers coming out of it reach your ledger correctly and reconcile every month.

Enough that no single template works. In the United States, payroll depends on federal withholding plus state income tax and unemployment insurance at both levels, with rules that change by state; employees in more than one state add genuine complexity. In the United Kingdom, payroll runs under PAYE with a submission due on or before every pay date, National Insurance for both employee and employer, and automatic pension enrolment with its own assessment and contribution rules.

In Canada, source deductions cover income tax, CPP and EI, with provincial rules layered on top. In Australia, the model is PAYG withholding, Single Touch Payroll reporting at each pay event, and super guarantee contributions paid with each pay run under Payday Super, which replaced the quarterly deadline from 1 July 2026.

In practice this means your employer cost is never just gross pay, the liabilities sitting on your balance sheet differ by country, and the deadlines that trigger penalties differ too. We handle the bookkeeping and reconciliation side consistently across all four. The statutory filing stays with your local agent, because that is where it belongs.

With a checklist, because this is where small-business payroll most often goes wrong. For a starter we need the start date, the agreed pay and pay basis, the tax details your country requires, bank details for payment, and any benefit or pension elections. Missing tax paperwork is the single most common reason a first payslip is wrong, so we chase it before the run rather than correct it afterwards.

For a leaver we need the last working day, any notice or holiday pay owed, deductions still to come, and whether final pay runs in the normal cycle or separately. Leavers are also where the control account quietly breaks: a final payment made outside payroll and coded straight to wages expense will never clear the liability the journal created.

Mid-period changes such as a raise, a role change or a move to part-time are recorded with an effective date so the split calculation is exact rather than approximated. Every change is confirmed back to you in writing before it is processed.

Usually yes, and it is a common request. We start by pulling the payroll registers for every period in question and rebuilding what should have been posted, then compare that to what actually hit the ledger. The findings are usually from the same short list: the whole net payment coded to a single wages line so employer costs disappeared, deductions never recorded as liabilities, one-off bonuses or final payments made outside the payroll system, and a control account that has been accumulating for years because nobody ever cleared it.

We correct it with dated journals and a schedule explaining what each correction is and why, so your accountant can follow the trail rather than take our word for it. Where a prior period has already been filed or reported, we do not quietly restate it. We show you and your tax professional exactly what changed and let them decide how it should be treated.

If the backlog is wider than payroll, our catch-up service handles the whole file together, which is usually cheaper than doing the two separately.

Two ways to buy. On a fixed monthly plan, payroll is included from Growth at $449 per month, covering up to 10 employees alongside full monthly bookkeeping, and Scale at $899 per month covers up to 30. The Essentials plan at $199 does not include payroll, and we will not pretend otherwise. If you want payroll handled but your bookkeeping already sits elsewhere, we quote it as a standalone engagement based on headcount, pay frequency and how many systems are involved.

The hourly route works too: $14 per hour for a bookkeeper, $20 for a senior bookkeeper who owns the run and the journals, and $28 for an ACCA-qualified accountant. Weekly payroll costs more than monthly for the obvious reason, which is four times the runs.

Cleaning up historical payroll postings is quoted separately as a one-off fixed fee once we have seen the file, so the recurring price stays honest. Every fee is agreed in writing before work starts, and the pricing page has the full table.