Tax table updates – and year end

PaymentEvolution payroll, our online calculators and all calculation engines have been updated to include the 2012 tax table updates and Canadian legislative changes. This means you can now process payroll for 2012 dates.

In addition, you can also perform your year-end processing, generate T4 slips and update your bookkeeping systems. 

The Payroll Nanny

We’re excited to launch The Payroll Nanny with our partners at Trowbridge Professional Corporation. Combining the robust calculation and processing engine of PaymentEvolution with the trusted services of Trowbridge, we’re giving Canadians a simple option to ensure their nannies and household staff get paid correctly and on time.

The service is available now for only $65/month and includes electronic payments for your nanny.

If you have a nanny or other caregiver in your home, or are considering one, you should read this excellent post fromBabyCenter which clearly outlines your responsibilities as an employer. The Payroll Nanny makes paying your household employee even easier by managing all the aspects of payroll – all deductions, calculations, remittances and payments are made for you.

Find us in the Bell Appstore

Thanks to the fine folks at AppDirect – we’re now in the Bell Business Appstore https://businessapps.bell.ca/apps/1081

If you need an easy way to provision your staff for cloud-based software, then the Bell Appstore is a convenient, one stop shop. By enrolling through this service you’ll be able to manage multiple subscriptions, permissions and software allocations for your staff.

PaymentEvolution payroll is available now in the store – so come check us out.

Launching integration with Xero

We’ve been testing PaymentEvolution Payroll integration with Xero for some time now but today, we’re officially launching the service for all existing and new clients. We’re excited about this integration – bringing full fledged Canadian payroll services to the online bookkeeping tools from Xero.

If you haven’t tried Xero – check it out – there’s a great free trial and the service provides a comprehensive way to manage your business finances, invoices and ledger. And, of course, now you get your Canadian payroll needs integrated too!

We have a good “getting started” guide posted in our community - http://community.paymentevolution.com/paymentevolution/topics/xero_integration. The setup process is straight forward essentially creating a connection between the services so we can post your payroll transactions to Xero. These transactions will show as a draft invoice which you can approve and commit to your Xero ledger. It’s simple and takes just a few minutes to setup.

Integration services are normally available to our clients on a paid plan but existing and new clients who sign up before Feb 1 2012 will receive Xero integration at no additional cost (even if you are on a free plan). You will be “grandfathered” and will always have this integration available to you. Did someone say free? YES – it’s free!

Canadians now have access to the some of the best cloud-based apps to run their businesses – full-featured online accounting from the wonderful folks at Xero and simple to use, enterprise-class payroll from PaymentEvolution. Let us know what you think – visit our community siteand give us your questions and comments.

Update and Changelog

Based on feedback from our growing community, we’ve implemented a few changes. Let us know how we’re doing and suggest other features you need –community.paymentevolution.com

Changelog

• Xero Online Accounting integration – Xero provides online accounting services for thousands of businesses. With our new integration, you can use our full-featured payroll service to pay your staff and have the data pushed to the Xero bookkeeping system. This saves you manual re-entry and re-keying. To get started, visitpaymentevolution.com/xero. If you are an existing client, we’re providing this integration for free. If you are considering PaymentEvolution for payroll services – sign up before Feb 1, 2012 and we’ll grandfather your account to include Xero integration for free as well. Thanks to those in our community who voted and made Xero our first integration partner.
• Mixed payment choices - Do you have some staff you need to pay via cheque and others who prefer our ePay services? Now you can select the preferred payment choice on a per payrun / per employee basis. You see this choice on our updated payment screen as you process your payrun. If you haven’t setup your staff for direct deposit / ePay – why not take advantage of our enrolment promotion? If you sign up before Nov 30, 2011 we’ll waive the normal $55 setup fee.
• Reporting enhancements - you can now view interim reports. If you are part-way through a payrun, you can now view interim reports associated with that pay cycle. The reports area now lists both final and interim reports, giving you a powerful audit trail of payroll entries in the system.
• Support for OpenID - for our integration partners, we now support OpenID

We’re getting a lot of feedback from our community – here’s one from AF

I no longer loathe payroll processing. I actually enjoy it now since it doesn’t take up my whole afternoon, or even a quarter of it. Thank you PaymentEvolution for providing a service that is accurate, simple to use and time saving. Thank you for understanding that I have other things to do at the office!

Please keep the suggestion, comments and feedback coming! We really do listen:community.paymentevolution.com

Scheduled maintenance

We’ll be posting an update to the system shortly. As part of our planned maintenance, the system will be sporadically available from Oct 17 0001ET (just after midnight) to Oct 17 0300ET. We’ll update this post once the updates are complete.

…and we’re done! Lot’s of new features … next blog post will have details.

Update and changelog

We're busy adding enhancements to the service - here are a few we've recently rolled out:

Changelog

• Advanced options for cheque printing – we now support both pre-printed and blank cheque forms. You can customize fonts, account codes etc. Please check with your bank as they may have certain requirements for accepting these customized cheques (including magnetic ink).


• More customization for GL codes - when we first offered the ability to customize general ledger codes (useful if you are exporting data for use in your accounting system) it was for general categories like source deductions. Now we've significantly enhanced this feature to give you custom GL codes at multiple levels. You can set GL codes at the company level (setting up a custom chart of accounts to match your accounting system). You can also set custom codes at the benefit/deduction/earnings level - giving you the flexibility to assign custom codes for custom pay rules (like setting your coffee fund deduction to GIFI code 8523 - "meals and entertainment"). You can even set custom codes at the employee level. Each employee or group of employees can have their own GL code - useful if you want to separate sales headcount from R&D headcount for example.


• Custom rules for benefits and deductions – you can now set non-cash/cash benefits and deductions (and further set taxation rules for them)


• For our accountant clients we now offer the ability to do true NET to GROSS calculations with full support of custom pay rules. You can set the NET amount you want to pay an employee and have the system calculate the gross amount with all the requisite source deductions calculated for you. You can even set custom deductions and benefits - we fully support "reverse payroll" through our efficient regression engine. Some of our clients are using this for special cases like shadow payroll and tax gross up situations.


• For our ePay clients we now support foreign company payments to Canadian-based employees. If you are a non-Canadian based employer, we can now support payments from your foreign bank account to your Canadian employees.

The feedback we gather at our user-community - community.paymentevolution.com – shapes the evolution of your payroll service. If you haven’t had a chance to head there, take a look and let us know how to make the service better for you.

Update and changelog

Based on client feedback we're releasing a few enhancements to the service today. As always, the feedback we gather at our user-community - community.paymentevolution.com - shapes the evolution of your payroll service. If you haven't had a chance to head there, take a look and let us know how to make the service better for you.

Changelog

• Rename your company - yes, you can now change the name of your company. This name is reflected on your employee payslips, records of employment and various tax forms. To change your company name, go to the setting menu bar and select company profile. Edit your company name and click "save" to record the changes.


• New report - cheques / payslips. Some clients have asked to have a printable payslip and/or cheque report so they can physically hand employees details of their pay. You can find the new report under the Reports menu bar. Remember, employees can still access their pay history through their own login credentials at www.PayChequer.com


• Custom rules for benefits and deductions - you can now add your own fields and have essentially unlimited number of rules you can apply in your organization. As always, you can customize the names of each rule (deduction / benefit) and give it a meaningful description so your employees know what the item is for (no more short codes and difficult to navigate legends). For information on how to setup custom rules for benefits or deductions see our community help article.


• Our e-Pay service now supports payments to your employees in the middle and last day of the month (in addition to Friday payments) allowing us to better support organizations on a semi-monthly pay cycle. Please remember to submit / finalize your payruns at least 7 calendar days ahead of the payment date to meet our processing time cutoffs.


• We continue enhancing the backend of the service to support new features. You may not see these immediately but we listen and implement the requests you make.

All these enhancements take place in our cloud infrastructure - without requiring you to download new software, install patches or update your system. Just log into your account, and the new features are available to you. Have an idea? We are always looking for feedback – if you have a feature request or want to see some changes, please let us know!

Update and changelog

The latest additions to PaymentEvolution Payroll are live and as always, we have our awesome user-community at community.paymentevolution.com to thank. Over there you can submit and vote on ideas, features and enhancements to your payroll service.

Changelog

• The latest payroll tables and calculation rules for 2011 are active. In addition, we've added the ability to "close" a payroll year so you can archive previous pay runs. If you haven't already, login and run your final pay run for 2010 and close your payroll year to activate the 2011 rules.


• We've added 8% accrual and release of vacation pay (in addition to our already supported 0%, 4% and 6% rates)


• Vacation pay now supports custom release amounts. You can now, for example, release only a portion of an employee's vacation balance as part of your regular pay run.


• Custom rules for benefits and deductions - you can now specify your own custom tags and calculation rules for various company deductions and benefits. You can use this feature to setup custom deductions for your employees (ie like a coffee fund deduction) as well as benefits (ie health club membership). Renaming each rule allows you to customize the decription in both your reports as well as the paystubs your employees see when logging into PayChequer.com


• We've added electronic payments - allowing you to pay your employees directly without printing or writing cheques. PaymentEvolution e-Pay is the safe, secure way to pay your staff and is available for only 50 cents per transaction. There are NO monthly fee, NO file fees, NO minimums. Its easy to get started - just click the e-Pay logo after you login to your account.


• Employee T4 forms are now available


• Multi-tax year support has been added.


• There have been many changes under the hood to support growth of the platform and added redundancy to ensure the service is available when you need it.

Since we run in the cloud, we can do updates frequently without requiring our user community to update software, download patches etc. We are always looking for feedback - if you have a feature request or want to see some changes, please let us know!