Contractor Payroll Solutions: Three Ways Costpoint Makes Payroll Easy

Before scaling up, almost all small business contractors struggle to manage payroll alongside their other expenses. Government contractors need a payroll system that allows them to preview payroll before processing, eliminate time-consuming errors, and synchronize payroll data with other systems. They also need an implementation team that audits data inputs and ensures compliance with wage laws and contract requirements.

Deltek Costpoint offers three flexible contractor payroll solutions that regardless of the speed of growth within a government contracting business, can effectively meet an organization’s immediate and future needs. These options include: processing payroll within Costpoint ERP software itself, processing payroll in Costpoint Government Contracting ERP while outsourcing tax filings, or utilizing payroll integration with a third party for payroll processing.

Discover how these contractor payroll services and solution offerings can be tailored to the specific needs of government contracting businesses and align with the phase of business maturity your company may be experiencing.

Option 1: Contractor Payroll Within Costpoint

If you’re a small business getting started, conducting payroll services in-house might not be feasible. If your organization is at a point where bringing payroll in-house is an option, there are a number of benefits that come with the Payroll module within Deltek Costpoint that can optimize this sometimes cumbersome task.

• Cost efficiency: Reduces overall costs running payroll in-house and eliminates having to develop a contractual commitment to a third-party vendor.
• Integrated ERP & HR solution: Payroll process is fully integrated and seamless with the rest of Costpoint (Cash Management, General Ledger & HRIS, Employee Self Service) along with Deltek Time/Labor. Tip: Choosing an ERP solution that does not have an integrated HR solution to support Payroll can cost you more time, money, and hassle in the long run. You may face challenges such as data inconsistency, manual errors, integration issues, compliance risks, and limited reporting capabilities. To avoid these problems, look for an ERP solution that has a seamless integration with a robust HR solution, such as Deltek Costpoint.
• Fewer overall risks and compliance issues: Outsourcing requires you to design and build an ongoing management of data integration feeds. If an interface fails, payroll is impacted causing employees to not get paid. The perception is that processing payroll in-house is riskier when actually the risk is typically associated with tax reporting within enterprise organizations, which can be outsourced.
• Greater control and flexibility: Owning the payroll process and associated deadlines allows for flexibility where needed. There are no extra costs for exceptions or concerns about missing cutoff windows through outsourced providers.
• Empower employees: Costpoint's Employee Self Service gives employees the ability to access some of their own payroll information including pay stubs and W2, creating fewer dependencies on HR.

Option 2: Payroll Processed in Costpoint With Outsourced Tax Filings

While Costpoint has the ability to manage the entire payroll process, many companies do not feel comfortable calculating and processing taxes. If you’d like to have all of the benefits expressed in Option 1 above but don’t want to do the tax processing yourself, you can still conduct your own payroll within Costpoint and outsource your tax filings with a third party. One benefit of Costpoint in this regard is the fact that Deltek offers a standard payroll tax export file with our payroll solution that will give you the data in the provider’s format. As mentioned previously, risk is typically tied to the tax reporting’s component of the payroll process. By outsourcing the tax filings, you eliminate unwanted risk while still having control over your internal payroll functionality.

Option 3: Third Party Payroll

The final option, allows you to do all your labor processing within Costpoint but completely outsource your payroll processing to a third party. This option is particularly attractive to smaller businesses that are either just starting out or are still in an initial growth phase. When you only have a few employees who wear multiple hats their time can be stretched across many projects and adding payroll to their schedules might not be feasible in the early stages. If you have a payroll provider that you have a good relationship with, a switch to Costpoint doesn’t mean you have to end that relationship. Costpoint has built-in integrations with ADP, Paychex, and Ceridian but can also integrate with most other third-party payroll providers through our open application programming interfaces (APIs). With a third party, you eliminate the workload from an employee who may already have too much on their plate or who might be better served 

Payroll Solutions & Next Steps for Government Contractors

Whichever payroll solution option suits your current business needs, know that Costpoint’s Integrated ERP and HR platform are flexible enough to support you and your contracting payroll requirements no matter your current phase of business growth.

Want to learn more about Costpoint and how we help government contractors meet their challenges head on?  Then request a Costpoint product demo to understand how Deltek’s integrated cloud solution helps government contractors manage people, projects, finance and resources within one powerful platform.