The Best Payroll Company for Small Business

An image of owner Mackenzie Vossler of The Local Branch at a desk with a typewriter, a reflection on being a small business owner discussing payroll solutuons

In the early days of The Local Branch, our focus was not on being a proficiently run business. We just felt lucky getting to do something we loved that could support our very fun but very frugal lifestyle. In hindsight, we really didn't button up our practices and pull a real paycheck from our business until many, many years later.

Around 2012, we were regularly attending pop up markets and vending at craft shows - around this time we were considering hiring for the first time, but it felt so widely surreal and hard I didn't really know how to start.

Make an application, send it out to the world, hope some cool people show up, interview them, let our gut guides us... that all feels intuitive, but then how do we pay them? How do we stay compliant? How do we even know what to do? That's when a close friend shared a company she used called Gusto for payroll services.

The idea of HR & Payroll sounded so abstract and hard for me to fathom at the time - we never imagined we'd actually make our little side hustle into something that would actually be viable enough to support ourselves, let alone others!

Those mental blocks we all have make things a lot harder than they need to be because honestly, running payroll through a company like Gusto is shockingly not hard at all. 

If you're a small business looking to make this next step, I've found their platform to be comparably priced to competitors, they have excellent customer service and they make everything really simple. If you decide to try them, use my link and you get a free gift card (and I get one too, but I'm not otherwise sponsored or paid by them, this is just my honest opinion!)

As a side note: I learned in a business class I took through the SBA much  later was to write down everything you do in a day or a week for your business and grade yourself.

Anything you give yourself a C or lower you should try to get off your plate - this is typically not something you like and it's also something you're not very good at. Finding a pro to do this for you takes an extreme amount of stress and pressure off of you and allows you to stay in your genius. For me, HR, bookkeeping, payroll are not my favorite things, so literally with Gusto all I do every two weeks is review my team's schedule for accuracy and update their hours into Gusto, then I check my bank account to make sure funds are allocated appropriately and submit. It usually takes me 30 minutes and I know everything else is handled.


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