pretend that you have been working as a payroll clerk, processing payroll in Excel at a new job that you started 3 months ago. The Excel spreadsheet doesn't include any tax tables or anything. You have to look that stuff up every time. You have been finding several mistakes that your predecessor was making as well as some other inefficiencies.

• The wrong amount of taxes were being withheld because as an employee would get paid more, but the person doing payroll was not changing the income tax amounts. They were just using the same income tax amount withheld last pay period. A worker would earn a different amount of wages each week, but the taxes stayed the same. This caused a few employees to have to pay a lot of taxes at the end of the year.
• The Excel spreadsheet had errors in the totals and nothing balanced, there were some formulas missing, or had the wrong tax rates.
• The quarterly and annual payroll tax returns were wrong because the numbers didn't balance to the spreadsheet.
• Yesterday you received a tax notice from IRS showing a balance due paid of $13,800 for last quarter, but no tax returns were ever filed. Now you are looking at penalties for filing late and paying late, which the boss will be unhappy about.
• The predecessor was not correctly determining how to treat 401k deductions and employees were being taxed incorrectly.
• The company has a Cafeteria Plan set up, but you discovered that the health insurance premiums were not being run through there, so employees were paying taxes on the premiums when they should not have been.

If that weren't enough, the boss, their name is Terry, also likes to take long weekends and leave the office early without telling anyone. It has been really hard to pin them down to get payroll checks signed. Five times in the past 3 months, employees have been paid late because of this. Some of the employees have not been able to pay rent on time

The requirement for this assignment are to create an initial post and follow up with replies to at least two group members.

Initial Post

Draft your post carefully and double check before submitting. You will not be allowed to edit this post after hitting submit. You will also not be able to read comments until you post.

Format your post as if it were an email to your boss. The first line of your email can be "Hi Terry, followed by something to get Terry's attention about the penalties. You need to approach the subject of using a payroll service. The rest of the email should include the following requirements:

Identify the problems and need to solve, concisely

• Summarize the problems you are having in a concise manner without copying word for word. Use your own voice in your writing.
• Suggest reasons why they should start using a payroll service and stop using an Excel spreadsheet.
• Your boss doesn't like really long emails, they like short and sweet, yet full of information!
• Ensure that your email is structured in such a way that it is easy to read, but concise and thorough.
• Use bullet points if it helps, but use correct sentence structure to set up the bullet list.

Links to Providers

• Include links to 3 different payroll processing companies, highlighting at least two unique features for each provider.
• You can include an overview of the features that they all have in common, but Calculating taxes is NOT a unique feature! While you may want to mention this to Terry as something that all three providers will do, it is not unique. Do your best to find things that make this provider stand out from the others. Do not use price as a unique feature.
• Links must be clickable and have a meaning in the link displayed. By "have a meaning in the link displayed", I mean that when you link to a page on a payroll provider website, you must shorten the link so what displays has meaning. Display the company name or something that identifies what I will find when I click there. Do not simply use the Hyperlink option above or you will lose points.