You wear many hats in your dental practice, and you don't always have the time to deal with the learning curve of trying new things. When it comes to dental office payroll, you may do it the way it’s always been done, even the same as the person you purchased the practice from, but what If you could make it better?
Gone are the days of paying your CPA or some outside third person to manage your dental office payroll. I'm here to tell you that you can handle it in-house with minimal effort and time by allowing the software to do the heavy lifting in the background. You can use payroll software to do things such as:
Preparing Payroll Income
Organizing Health, Vision, or Dental Benefits
Providing 401K benefits to Employees
Keeping track of Employees Working Time
Below, I present dental payroll tools that, if used together, will cut the mundane payroll tasks in half and replace human hours with simple, streamlined, automated software. Read more below!
Gusto (Payroll Service)
An epic payroll platform that I encourage all dentists to use is Gusto. There will be another blog post coming shortly with more details about the platform, including an invite to a free online e-course I created to demonstrate Gusto and teach our clients how to use it. But, for the sake of not making this blog post 20,000 words, I will just say that it doesn't matter what your current payroll service is, Gusto is better. You can trust me. I've experienced every payroll company out there for small businesses, including your CPA's and their old school methods.
Gusto isn't just better in features, they have impeccable customer support, and they are better in price too. We don't offer payroll services with our bookkeeping service because you don't need it if you use Gusto. The automation capabilities of Gusto's platform is brilliant, and I am in heaven when I run payroll for my own company.
Gusto Website: https://gusto.com/
Preview of my free Gusto e-course: https://learn.bookkeepingfordentists.com/gusto
Gusto (Integrated Benefits)
Gusto benefits offer free medical, dental, and vision administration for your practice and employees. I have health insurance, dental, and vision for my employees through Gusto, and I can't be happier with how it turned out.
Plans are competitive, and the benefits sync with payroll to make it simple when adding plans, changing plans, hiring new employees, or terminating employees. It works in the background, and you don't ever have to think about it. If you get your benefits through Gusto, employees have the opportunity to enroll themselves and their dependents without you having to do anything. What a time saver it has been for me!
Gusto Benefits website link: https://gusto.com/product/benefits
Guideline (401k Service)
Are you offering a 401(k) in your dental practice? If not, do you think you might want it in the future? Well, I have the perfect 401(k) service for you. Guideline is an all-inclusive 401(k) plan perfect for dental practices. Guideline is easy for you, as the dentist, to set up online and even easier for your employees to onboard themselves and be in control of their retirement without you lifting a finger. Yep, that's my favorite part - I don't lift a finger!
Guideline is connected with Gusto payroll. It withdrawals the 401k contributions each pay period automatically. You don't have to worry about managing it. Employee onboarding is super simple too. When I add a new hire to Gusto payroll, I enter their email address, and the new hire will receive an email. It provides the new hire with an invite to do their onboarding in both Gusto and their Guideline 401(k) account. If the employee wants to adjust how much they are contributing, they can log in and do that themselves. If they want to manage their portfolio, they can log in and do that too. It puts the back office stuff on the employees, not you, and the employees love the flexibility both Gusto and Guideline gives them.
Want to know the price? $39 per month, +$8/mo for each participant. You can't beat that.
Guideline Website Link: https://www.guideline.com/
Homebase (Employee time/scheduling App)
Homebase is an online employee scheduling and time clock software. If you are currently using a time clock with your payroll service, Homebase would be the recommended time clock if you switch to Gusto. You may even like it better than your practice management software time clock. The software integrates with Gusto and imports your employee hours per pay period. There are so many awesome time and money-saving features with this app; I can't even go through them all. I encourage you to go to their website and look over everything it has to offer. Full disclosure, though, I do not have first-hand experience using the application with Gusto. I have heard a lot about it through our clients.
Homebase website link: https://joinhomebase.com/
Homebase tutorial videos: https://joinhomebase.com/product-videos/
These applications all connected, and collaborating will make dental practice payroll processes much easier. Don't delegate this exploratory to your staff until you have a good idea of how everything works and what you want. Then after you've gotten as far as possible in learning, get your office manager or team involved in making it a smooth transition. The more you know, the better you can control and improve any waste in the payroll process changes.
Please share this post with others if you believe they will find it helpful. If you'd like to get access to my free Gusto e-course opening soon, click this link here and add your email address to my launch list. It will be a good resource for training someone in the practice how to manage Gusto and run payroll.
Thank you for reading!
Sona Wegner, MBA
Founder