5 Reasons Your CPA Will Love Working With a PEO
Human resources professionals like to serve employees. Your CPA wants to save money. A professional employer organization can satisfy both desires, and that's why financial pros agree that partnering with a PEO is one of the best decisions you can make for your small business.
The HR Burden
Small business owners need to develop a strategic approach to managing their employees early in the business planning process. The small business innovator approaches everything with a fresh and transforming passion–everything except people, that is. Entrepreneurs, for some reason or another, tend to fall back on traditional approaches when it comes to managing the people who work for them. Many times, that's because they haven't had any training or experience with people management and motivation. It's just not in their skill set.
Any new business will wrestle with numerous tasks and challenges in the first months and years, so it often doesn't make sense for owners to take on the complex human problems of the business when those needs extend beyond their specific strengths and abilities.
That's why so many business owners turn to PEOs. People are a PEO’s job. The PEO provides a variety of human services: time and payroll management, employee benefits negotiation and delivery, tax filing and compliance, workers’ compensation administration and risk management. They also recruit and on-board employees, assess performance and discipline, and manage leave and productivity metrics. Assign real time to each of these tasks, and you see how much time you can save by co-employing staff through a PEO.
The CPA Bargain
PEO clients represent 15% of companies with less than 100 employees, $136 million in payroll, and up to 3.4 million employees across the country and across industry lines. More small and mid-size employers are taking the advice of their financial advisors by outsourcing tasks to PEOs, because partnering with a PEO not only makes the business more efficient and productive, but increases the likelihood of business success by 50%. (source: NAPEO)
- The PEO is employer of record and assumes responsibility for compliance before the EEOC, NLRB, Title VII, FLSA, COBRA/ERISA, IRCA, ADA, and the rest of the regulatory alphabet soup.
- The PEO administers, pays, and reports IRS, State, FICA, and local payroll related taxes.
- The PEO takes advantage of its larger labor pool to negotiate employee benefits and workers’ compensation insurance rates from a position where economies of scale have a real impact.
- The PEO takes on the burden of proof on employee filings and compliance requirements.
- The PEO boasts a trained staff that is always on top of volatile employment law and practices.
