Payroll Calculated Before the Run, Not Corrected After It
Payroll is the one part of your month that cannot be a little bit late or a little bit wrong. Your employees find out the same day. The CRA finds out a few weeks later, and by then it costs money.
We run yours on whatever cycle you already use, semi-monthly, bi-weekly, or monthly, for a flat $200 per cycle. That one fee covers:
- The pay run, the stubs, and the direct deposits
- The CRA remittance for the same period
- T4 and T4A slips at year-end
- A Record of Employment whenever someone leaves or goes on leave
- Your WCB reporting to WorkSafeBC
It is one predictable line in your budget. Everything on that list is part of the same payroll service, so none of it comes back later as a separate quote.
Your employees notice payroll before they notice anything else you do
A person who is short on their cheque does not file a support ticket. They come and find you, on a day when you were doing something else, and the conversation is awkward for both of you even when the fix takes ten minutes.
So the checking happens before the money moves, not after. Every run goes through the same sequence: hours and changes confirmed against what you sent, gross pay calculated, CPP, EI, and income tax withheld, then the totals compared against the previous cycle so anything that jumped gets looked at before anyone is paid. When a number does move, you get a sentence explaining why, and a question about your own payroll gets an answer within one business day.
Hourly crews, split shifts, and stat holidays are where the math actually breaks
Transferring money is the easy part of payroll. Working out the right amount is where it goes wrong, and that is a problem of variable hours more than anything else. Vancouver’s business base leans heavily on restaurants and independent retail, and those are the payrolls where nobody’s total is the same twice: different shifts, different rates, and a schedule that changed on Wednesday.
Statutory holiday pay in BC is calculated from what each person actually earned in the 30 calendar days before the holiday, so it moves as hours move. Overtime, shift differentials, a raise that lands mid-period, and a final cheque with vacation payout all get calculated at the point of the run. Not estimated, and not fixed afterwards.
A pay run should not depend on whether a subscription renewed
Owners who moved to an automated payroll tool tell a version of the same story. The run went out, the filing quietly did not, nobody was notified, and the first news of it arrived as a penalty letter months later. One owner put it plainly: the reason a small business uses a payroll company is that they are not accountants and need help with exactly these things.
Your cycle belongs to a person here, not to a setting. We know when your pay dates fall, we know the CRA remittance that follows each one, and we know when the filing was accepted. Nothing about your payroll is waiting for you to notice that it stopped.
Someone on the wrong side of the employee line gets expensive later
Plenty of businesses have a long-standing contractor who looks a lot like staff: set hours, your tools, your direction, no other clients. That arrangement is comfortable until the CRA reviews it. If they reclassify that person as an employee, the corporation owes the CPP and EI that should have been withheld, plus penalties and interest, and the review can reach back several years.
Before your first run, we go through who is on your payroll and who is being paid outside it, and we tell you straight where we think the risk sits. It is a much easier conversation to have now, with a decision in front of you, than in a room with an auditor and a number already attached.
One number per cycle, however many people you pay
The fee is $200 a cycle and it is quoted before anything starts. There is no per-employee meter that grows every time you hire, no separate charge for the remittance because it is part of the same job, and no invoice arriving because you emailed a question about your own payroll. If you would rather have payroll carried alongside the books and the tax work on a single monthly fee, that is full-cycle bookkeeping.
If you need work well outside that scope, such as modelling what a new hire actually costs you, that is billed at $120 an hour and we tell you before the clock starts rather than after. You should be able to predict what your back office costs you a year from now. That is most of what fixed pricing is for.
Payroll Processing FAQs
Hours for anyone paid hourly, plus anything that changed: a new hire, a raise, a leave, a termination, a bonus. Send it by the cutoff we agree on and nothing else is asked of you. We calculate the run, produce the pay stubs, file the remittance, and send you a short summary of what went out and why it differs from last cycle.
Usually yes. We run payroll inside QuickBooks Online or Xero, and we can work with the standalone payroll tool you already have if it is doing its job. The account stays in your name either way, so the records, the history, and the filings remain yours and you can take them with you if you ever leave.
Yes, and mid-year is the most common time people switch. Before your first run with us, we verify the year-to-date totals already recorded: gross pay, CPP, EI, income tax, and taxable benefits per employee. If the prior numbers are wrong, we would rather find it in July than in February when the T4s will not balance.
Tell us the day you hear about it. Depending on the size of the error we either issue an off-cycle payment right away or correct it on the next run, and either way the CRA remittance is adjusted to match what was actually paid. We also trace how it happened, because a payroll error that is only corrected tends to happen again.
Yes. Vacation pay is accrued and tracked as a liability so you always know what is owed, whether your people take time or get paid it out. Statutory holiday pay in BC is calculated from what the employee actually earned in the 30 calendar days before the holiday, which changes every time hours change. We run that calculation each holiday rather than repeating last year's figure.
