PayCycle Turns Payroll Into Easy Work

"The bulk of our customers have five or fewer employees," says company vice president of product management Karen White, "and we're growing fast, adding as many as 400 new customers a day." That reflects the fact, she adds, that nearly nine out of ten employees work in companies with 20 or fewer employees.

Accounting is by itself a generally boring chore. You are, after all, responsible for more exciting things, such as designing your next product, pulling together a marketing plan for your business, and selling your products. But sooner or later you have to do the accounting and, possibly worse, you have to pay people, which means complying with all sorts of tax rules, rates, and regulations. It also means paying federal, state, and local taxes on your employees' behalf every quarter.

Payroll is a lot of tedious work, but according to a study conducted for PayCycle by National Family Opinion (NFO) only 35 percent of small businesses have enough knowledge to do payroll correctly--yet about three quarters of small businesses are doing some or all of their own payroll work.

Payroll Made Simple

PayCycle can do it all for you instead. Almost all you have to do is sign up, sign in, describe your employees, and get them paid. "PayCycle is just unbelievable," says Gary Scheittler, president of Paradise Properties in Alden, MI. "We used to scramble around every Friday trying to figure out who should get paid what amount, and how to allocate the funds. PayCycle just eliminated all that with practically no effort on our part."

There is a bit more to the PayCycle process, but it's all not very hard to do. And PayCycle's latest innovation is a startup system called "My Setup Wizard" announced this week that walks users through the process with little or no pain. The style of the startup system is reminiscent of the interview scheme that TurboTax has used successfully for a number of years, something that White freely acknowledges. "I'm a huge fan of that system," she says.

"Getting started with a new payroll solution can seem like a daunting task," says White, "especially for small employers who are still doing payroll by hand." PayCycle staffers spent time during the past two years observing customers work in order to design the easiest setup process possible. "Remember," says White, "our mission is to make paper-based payroll obsolete and our new My Setup Wizard is a great step forward on that mission."

Doing It With You

The new startup system is really an enhancement of what the company likes to call its "do it with you" (DIWY) approach to Web-based applications software. No matter where you are in the PayCycle process, the system offers help designed to move you through whatever task is in front of you, whether it's adding new employees, implementing new features, or just running cyclical chores.