HACKER Q&A
📣 adamlangsner

Anyone done payroll for a one person LLC?


I have a single member LLC that I'm filing as an S-Corp to reduce my taxes.

Now that I'm going to be an employee of my company I looked into some payroll solutions (Quickbooks, JustWorks, Gusto) and was surprised at some of the pricing for a single person.

I did some research and it doesn't seem too difficult to do a basic payroll (no benefits, payed quarterly) for just yourself, it seems like it's a few forms: some quarterly, some at tax time.

For a basic payroll is it worth it to pay $500 - $600 / yr, when you can do it yourself? Am I underestimating the complexity of payroll or am I missing some aspect that I can't do myself?

helpful articles I found:

https://evergreensmallbusiness.com/quick-and-dirty-payroll-for-one-person-s-corps/

https://www.patriotsoftware.com/payroll/training/blog/small-business-payroll-program-irs-forms/


  👤 mattbillenstein Accepted Answer ✓
If you don't have a tax consultant, get one; you can pay and deduct these expenses out of the business.

I do a monthly transfer from my business to personal checking within the same bank - it's free - takes less than a minute per month.

I dump my bank transactions as csv and drop them into a google sheet - this gets handed off to my tax consultant at the end of the year.

My tax consultant tells me when to pay payroll taxes -- either quarterly or I might just lump it into the last couple quarters of the year depending on how my situation for the year is shaping up. I login to eftps and edd and do this manually - again, doesn't take that long.

It's lightweight for one person - I never thought to use a service to manage it.


👤 sharemywin
Don't forget Workers comp, unemployment, state, local school district taxes.

I've used this before: http://www.realtaxtools.com/W2-Mate.html

Though I regretted it and wished I would have just paid the money. Software is pretty good just would have rather focused on the business.