Best Payroll Software For Restaurants
Running a restaurant should not keep you on your fingertips all day managing its operations, no matter how large your restaurant is. Instead, smart restaurant owners invest in payroll and HR software to streamline and automate their operations, in addition to the point of sale system to seamlessly sync front and back of house operations and to provide customers a great experience. Some point of sale systems for restaurants come bundled with payroll software to provide restaurant owners a centralized platform to manage and oversee their employees' records, working times, wages, and a whole set of restaurant management tools.
Running payrolls manually can take up a lot of your time, and calculation errors are bound to happen, including possible compliance risks. A payroll software saves you from the burden of manual calculations and compliance risks. It can automate your payroll runs and automatically calculate your staff's wages and tips according to their working hours, which are tracked using time tracking software that usually comes packed with payroll software.
Taxes are also a worrying factor for many business and restaurant owners. Misfiling a tax or committing an error in payment can result in costly fines. But, again, payroll software saves the day with its automated tax filing service for all your staff, so you will not have to worry about being fined.
HR solutions found with payroll software could include workforce management, recruiting and onboarding, and talent management. These tools will help your restaurant reduce turnover and help you find the best talent. For example, recruiting tools allow you to post job openings on social media channels, and track an applicant's hiring progress, to easily set up and schedule interviews.
Speaking of scheduling, payroll software usually comes with time and attendance tools where you can easily schedule your staffs' shifts based on their performance and availability while maintaining compliance with predictive scheduling and overtime laws. Employees can also easily request time offs or vacations using it and have their managers accept or deny them just as easily as well.
Now that you are familiar with the features you should expect to find in payroll software for restaurants, let us present you with our top three recommendations.
Best Payroll Software for Restaurants
1. Toast
Toast may be a familiar name, being one of the best points of sale systems for restaurants. It offers dedicated restaurant solutions to help you run it smoothly and efficiently. Such solutions include order management, where customers' orders are directly sent to the kitchen after paying by their tableside. Menu management allows you to edit your menus across all platforms swiftly and have the changes synced, as Toast is a cloud-based system.
Moreover, Toast also gifts you with customer management tools, marketing tools, and third-party integrations to provide your system with extra features and functionalities. For example, Toast offers its payroll and team management software as add-ons to its point of sale system, where you get automatic payroll calculations and runs with appropriate tax filing. The payroll software automatically syncs with the point of sale system to calculate and add an employee's tips to their wages. It also allows you to manage multiple pay rates, minimum wage requirements, and blended overtime across different locations for all your employees.
Team management tools allow you to manage your staff's shifts and availability from a single place. You also get insights and reporting regarding your employees' performances to identify ways to reduce your restaurant's labor costs.
Toast's onboarding tools will provide your new hires with electronic forms and documents to sign and fill up and have them stored in their point of sale system's accounts and profiles for easy access and to stay organized and compliant.
Toast's payroll add-on also packs a benefits administration platform, where it provides your employees easy access to open enrollment and easy access to their plans and benefits.
Toast offers two subscription plans to its point of sale system, where its payroll and team management tools are available as extra add-ons. The two plans are the Essentials plan which costs $165 per month, and the fully-featured Growth plan, which costs $355 per month. Payroll and team management add-on prices are not advertised, so you will have to contact Toast to get your price for them.
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2. SurePayroll
SurePayroll is our second pick for the best payroll software for restaurants. SurePayroll made history being the first payroll software to provide completely online payroll and tax-filing solutions to the industry in the year 2000.
SurePayroll provides industry-specific solutions, and most importantly, for restaurants. It can automate and schedule your payroll runs and help you file and pay your taxes while being compliant. In the case that you get fined by the IRS due to a tax filing or calculation error while using SurePayroll, they promise to fix the issue on your behalf and pay for any associated penalties.
You are also gifted with a mobile application for its payroll software, which allows you to access your employees' data, profile, and documents from anywhere and process your payroll at any time on the go.
SurePayroll has full integration with the time clock software stratustime that allows you to track your staff's working hours and calculate their wages accordingly. Moreover, your staff can use their mobile phones, web, and online timesheet to clock in and out and record their hours.
Furthermore, SurePayroll software also packs an employee benefits platform where you get to manage 401 (k) retirement plans, workers' compensations, health insurance; it connects you with the top insurance providers like Liberty Mutual Insurance, Guard Insurance Group, The Hartford, and many more to get competitive prices for your staff.
As for its restaurant-specific solutions, they provide you with automatic minimum wage alerts when an employee's tips don't meet federal wage requirements. In addition to that, you get tip signoff reports that record your employees' tip declarations and you stay compliant with federal regulations. Last but not least, you get access to the FICA tip credit report to know your eligibility for federal tax savings based on the FICA tip credit.
SurePayroll offers two plans for its payroll software, Self-service and Full-service plans. The Self-Service plan starts at $19.99 per month plus $4 per employee, while the full-service plan starts at $29.99 per month plus $5 per employee. The difference between the two is that the latter provides federal and state tax filing, HR advisor, and 2-day payroll processing.
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3. OnPay
OnPay is our third choice for the best payroll software for restaurants for several reasons, the most important of which is it is the most user-friendly software to use as it also provides restaurant-specific solutions with its payroll software.
OnPay's payroll software gives you the power to schedule and automate multiple payrolls for different employees and gives them the option to be paid through either direct deposits, debit card payments, or physical checks. It will also hand your tax filing, including W-2s and 1099s, in multiple states at no extra cost.
You are also provided with an employee platform where your staff can access their documents and forms by themselves, and you get a centralized view of their profiles, data, and reports. They can also request leaves and vacations from the PTO management tools, send in-app messages and create charts and rosters.
OnPay's restaurant-specific solutions allow you to create simple overtime rules and calculations, in addition to the form 8846 preparation for FICA tip credit and free multi-state payroll processing.
OnPay does not offer plans for its payroll software; instead, it charges a fixed fee of $36 per month, plus $4 per employee, and you also get your first month free of charge.