As a business owner, you’ve got the responsibility to ensure all of your workers receive their salary on time. In addition to paying your workers, you are responsible for withholding some money in the form of deductions. You need to subtract payroll deductions from each employee’s total pay for benefits, garnishments and taxes.
And after deduction, employees remain with their wages, commonly known as net pay. The most popular Colombia payroll deductions include retirement plan contributions, state and federal taxes, Medicare tax and social security tax. If you want to ensure your employee paychecks are correct and that you are always on top of any premium payments or necessary tax withholdings for every worker, you need to understand payroll deductions.
This article explains what payroll is and explores the different types available, their components, and the associated liabilities and penalties. Keep reading to discover more.
What’s Payroll?
Payroll involves paying wages to employees. The payroll process includes computing employee earnings and deducting government deductions from the total wages.
Payroll also refers to staff wages yearly records, staff paychecks distribution and employee financial records. The stages of a payroll process include computing net pay, solving errors, distributing payments, reporting and paying taxes.
Components Of Payroll
A payroll includes three main components; employee information, wages and deductions. Here are more details about these components.
Employee Information
When hiring employees, you collect some sensitive information that you’ll use to pay them. After hiring suitable candidates, they must fill out forms, including W4, that provide employee income tax deductions information.
It also includes personal information, such as an address, social security number and name. With this information, a business owner can process the payroll and pay wages to employees.
Salaries or Wages
Depending on your company’s payroll policy, you can pay workers on an hourly, weekly or monthly basis. They must receive an agreed amount after all deductions as net pay during each pay period.
Wage earners or hourly workers receive their earnings as per their hourly rates. Employees’ yearly statements might indicate gross pay, benefit contributions, reimbursements, net pay, time worked, additional income and overtime pay.
Payroll Deductions
Two different payroll deductions are available, including voluntary and mandatory. Let’s take a look at these two categories.
Voluntary Payroll Deductions
While these deductions aren’t mandatory, you need to subtract them from your workers’ paychecks. These payroll deductions primarily cover employee benefits. Before starting to withhold voluntary payroll deductions, you must have written consent from your workers.
Various voluntary payroll deductions are available, including retirement plans, health savings account contributions, health insurance premiums, charitable giving, disability premiums, life insurance, and union dues.
Mandatory Payroll Deductions
These are deductions required by law. You need to deduct them from your workers’ gross pay before you can issue paychecks. Payrolls under the mandatory umbrella are simply taxes. You’re required by law to hold back payroll taxes from your workers and surrender them to appropriate tax organisations.
If you fail to submit payroll taxes, you risk facing severe penalties for your company, not to mention associated issues like loss of valuable time and lack of peace of mind. The different tax deduction types available in the payroll world include:
Local Taxes
Based on the location of your business, you may need to deduct local taxes from your employees to support your county, sub-county, city or town.
State Taxes
Each state features a unique tax structure. Countries that have states require businesses to withhold a certain percentage of their employees’ salaries as tax.
Federal Taxes
You’re responsible for subtracting federal income taxes from your workers’ paychecks each pay period. The federal government regulates these taxes, which support national programs such as community development, education, and defence.
The amount you withhold from employees depends on the allowances they claim and their gross pay. Generally, the federal income tax amount ranges between 10% and 37% of taxable income.
Medicare and Social Security Taxes
Business owners must also legally withhold social security and Medicare taxes from their workers’ wages. The money you withhold goes into different trust funds, including old-age, insurance and disability. These trust funds include survivor and retirement as well as disability benefits. In most cases, social security acts as safety for disabled and retired workers.
Medicare insurance is a tax for medical care. Most countries require businesses and their employees to pay Medicare tax. Medicare tax deductions go into two trust funds: medical and hospital insurance. These taxes help with medical fees that employees may be required to pay across their lives.
Payroll Liabilities and Penalties
Ensuring everything is done according to the law regarding payroll can be challenging. There are numerous things to cover, making it difficult or confusing if you have many workers. Errors are common; however, it’s vital to understand the primary payroll penalties and liabilities linked to these mistakes.
Minor mistakes like entering incorrect data, payment schedule or payment posting aren’t in most cases penalised. These are usually as a result of misreading information or typos rather than wilful intent to deceive. To avoid such mistakes, always ask your HR team to double-check all information prior to finalising the payroll process. The HR team should be swift in terms of correcting errors.
Aside from these minor issues, huge problems can mean you’re liable to pay compound interests, severe penalties and fines. The most common issues that can result in costly penalties include repeatedly filing or paying late, repeatedly making the same errors, not collecting taxes at all and not sending taxes to appropriate authorities.
Final Thoughts
Payroll deductions are a tricky and serious task for any business, whether small or large. Many businesses outsource their payroll functions to third-party service providers to avoid legal penalties and fees.
These service providers ensure the whole process is smooth as they have highly trained individuals and experts. With the best-outsourced payroll functions service provider, you can have much-needed peace of mind, knowing that you’re free from tax and other deductions, as well as legal fees.
