Small to medium-sized businesses regularly partner with staffing agencies for a variety of reasons. Most notably, they reduce hiring time for their business clients in a cost-effective manner. Lowering the risk of hiring mistakes provides cost savings, while efficient processes for finding talent shrink time-to-hire.

However, payroll compliance remains an important concern for smaller businesses, especially considering the risks of fines and tax penalties. No business wants a hit on its reputation, let alone the financial loss, due to a failure of compliance. In short, helping businesses maintain regulatory compliance remains an important benefit staffing agencies might offer to clients. This is especially the case with staffing agency clients boasting a large contingent or temporary workforce.

Staffing agencies provide payroll compliance support for their clients in a myriad of ways. This includes well-honed, modern processes for managing payroll and other HR tasks. Additionally, leveraging a modern time-tracking solution also helps agencies achieve this goal for their clients. Let’s explore this important potential benefit for your clients and how our time tracking systems help.

How Can Staffing Agencies Ensure Payroll Compliance for Small Businesses?

Payroll Compliance Remains Critical for Small Businesses

Small businesses naturally lack the extensive HR staff and team of lawyers typical of a larger enterprise. Nevertheless, the risks of non-compliance with payroll and similar regulations remain too important to overlook. As noted earlier, these threats include potential fines and tax penalties hampering the profitability of any business. Of course, the business’s reputation also suffers as a result.

Of course, the array of government employment laws related to payroll also needs to be closely followed. These include the Equal Pay Act (EPA), Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA), and more. Local and state regulations also need consideration. Your agency probably employs experts in this area, especially if providing contingent workforce management services to clients.

A top-shelf payroll processing app helps businesses stay in compliance, especially compared to manually calculating employee pay. Still, the company’s HR team needs to be aware of any filing deadlines as well as changes to employment law. Additionally, time tracking remains a critical process sometimes fraught with the risk of timesheet falsification. For businesses with a small HR staff, these efforts become overburdening.

Faced with this scenario, having your staffing agency help clients with payroll compliance needs to be explored. In addition to this payroll help, the client’s staffing process becomes more efficient and cost-effective while other benefits abound. Arguably most important is the ability for their managers and HR staff to focus on internal operations. Let’s take a closer look!

Staffing Agencies offer Valuable Payroll Compliance Help for Small Business

Understand that many small and medium-sized businesses struggle with payroll compliance. This is especially the case when they employ a large number of temporary workers. These types of businesses typically deal with a wide variety of employment contracts and subsequent payroll compliance requirements. Leveraging your staffing agency’s expertise in this area offers another selling point to potential clients interested in talent acquisition.

Let’s examine some of the most important ways a staffing agency helps their SMB clients with payroll compliance. Use these insights to craft marketing materials advertising these services along your talent acquisition offerings. You gain the opportunity to help existing clients while growing your agency with new referrals.

• Ensuring Accurate Citizenship Information for New Hires: A completed I-9 form remains a critical requirement for any new hire. Staffing agencies understand the importance of this issue for small businesses. The top agencies use E-Verify to ensure each new employee’s I-9 information matches federal government records. This prevents your client from hiring someone with a soon-to-be-expired visa or inaccurate I-9 data.
• Properly Timed Background Checks are Critical: Background checks on the candidate your client hires remain important for reducing the risk of hiring mistakes. However, the timing of these checks also needs to be considered. Never conduct a check before the acceptance of a job offer or without the candidate’s permission. Failure to comply risks legal entanglements for both your agency and client.
• Ensuring All Workers are Properly Classified: Small businesses sometimes fail to properly classify workers as either W2 employees or independent contractors. Obviously, this is an important payroll compliance issue for clients. When presenting candidates, definitely highlight the importance of this regulation. Also, consider offering contingent workforce management services where you manage worker classification for your clients.
• Accurate Time Tracking is Vital: Don’t overlook the importance of timesheet accuracy for your clients or when offering workforce management services. Leveraging a state-of-the-art platform for biometric time tracking improves accuracy while reducing timesheet fraud. Consider implementing a time-tracking system for your internal operations as well as highlighting its benefits to clients.

Advertising the ways your agency helps clients with payroll compliance support ultimately leads to more business opportunities. As highlighted above, use this information in your marketing materials to amplify the message of your service offerings to small businesses.

Want to Learn More About Our Payrolling Benefits?

If your agency wants to explore the benefits of biometric time tracking for improving productivity and more, contact Timerack. Our hardware and software platform improves your efficiency as well as that of your clients. Schedule a demo of our timekeeping tools to see how we make a positive impact on businesses of all sizes!