Empowering Payroll Advisory with Wagepoint and Xero at King Business Solutions [Case Study]

As a payroll practitioner and professional bookkeeper, Melissa Lenos, CPB, PCP, of King Business Solutions knows her stuff when it comes to the payroll and bookkeeping process. She understands the implications of many finer payroll details that small business owners might not know to look for, what the consequences are of not meeting compliance or deadlines and how to show her clients where they could be saving money.

She also knows how much easier handling payroll and payroll bookkeeping can be when done with software versus the manual process.

Melissa is a big fan of Wagepoint and Xero and makes use of the integration between these two software with many of her clients. In fact, when taking on new clients, if they don’t already have payroll or accounting software, this is the tag-team-duo she recommends to make working with the data a breeze.

Melissa Lenos, CPB, PCP, King Business Solutions

Wagepoint and Xero simplify the bookkeeping workflow.

The Wagepoint and Xero integration essentially skips the workflow line by eliminating manually inputting data from one software to another. Think about those times when you’ve had to take data from a piece of paper, a file, a folder, another software or wherever and input it somewhere else. That’s a lot of time spent on data entry that could have been better spent elsewhere, right?

Not only does the Wagepoint and Xero integration make inputting the data easier with the click of a button, it also makes accessing the data simple for multiple team members to work on their various tasks related to a client’s books. For instance, at King Business Solutions, payroll processing and other bookkeeping tasks are divvied up among the team. With the integration taking the information from Wagepoint to put into Xero, that process of accessing the data they need to work on becomes a heck of a lot easier.

[The Wagepoint and Xero integration is] great. It pulls in reports. I don’t even have to go into Wagepoint. I get it pushed, and then the bookkeeper can take a look.
— Melissa Lenos, CPB, PCP, King Business Solutions

The time-saving magic of Wagepoint.

Apart from the integration saving time, Wagepoint saves Melissa and her team both effort and hours that she now uses to bring on new clients and become more of a payroll advisor to them.

And those time savings? They’re big.

Melissa says for one client alone, it used to take three-and-a-half hours a month to do their payroll using a desktop-based software because of the manual work involved. With Wagepoint in the mix? It’s 45 minutes.

There’s so much time savings just having to review something instead of having to do the bulk of the data entry.
— Melissa Lenos, CPB, PCP, King Business Solutions

Wagepoint’s customization options and the ability to connect with support for help with certain tasks has also cut down on the time it takes to set up and input data or settings related to payroll.

What I find with Wagepoint, which I find a lot of people maybe don’t realize, is you can do a lot of the same things as you could with desktop, it’s just you’re not the one setting it up. I message Wagepoint and I’m like, ‘Okay, construction company, can you add 3.6% to the vacation?’ Boom done.
— Melissa Lenos, CPB, PCP, King Business Solutions

She also loves how the employee portal gives her clients’ employees access to their pay stubs, meaning fewer reach out because an employee lost their pay stub or needs another copy of it for some other reason.

Payroll processing workflow with Wagepoint.

King Business Solutions has one person on the team (with Melissa as backup!) that handles payroll processing for their clients, most of whom are using Wagepoint. Yet, that team member handling payroll isn’t spending their entire time processing payroll. Melissa says it’s about a 60-40 split, where 60 percent of their time is focused on payroll and the remaining 40 percent is other bookkeeping tasks.

Given how many of their clients are on Wagepoint and how much time the employee spends on payroll, Melissa estimates that about 40 percent of the employee’s payroll-focused time is spent processing for about 60 percent of their clients.

Lightening the year-end workload.

Year-end work is an area where Melissa and her team see a lot of time savings. She notes Wagepoint makes working with, changing and submitting year-end forms and sharing information easier.

From a payroll practitioner viewpoint, Wagepoint is outstanding for year-end. It probably decreases the time I spend on T4s by at least 50 percent if not 60 or 70 percent. Wagepoint is so easy to review, it’s so easy to make changes.
— Melissa Lenos, CPB, PCP, King Business Solutions

To her point about making changes, Melissa says she has some clients with Individual Pension Plans (IPPs), where it’s not something that necessarily goes through payroll. This calls for a T4 adjustment to account for it.

All she has to do in Wagepoint is select Edit, make the change and that’s it. With a previous payroll processor, the process involved making amendments that cost time and money since the processor would simply send out the T4 as is instead of giving her team the opportunity to make changes.

In Wagepoint, she says:

The reviewing’s easier. The source deductions are always correct. Editing is easier, and then the release is so easy, and the employees just pop in there themselves and grab what they want.
— Melissa Lenos, CPB, PCP, King Business Solutions

Highlighting client KPIs.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) aren’t something Melissa says are really on her small business clients’ radars. Still, she uses Wagepoint‘s reporting features to show her clients the impact payroll and having employees has on their business.

Some information she shares includes non-revenue details like how many employee terminations they’ve had and what turnover looks like for the company.

Some of the KPIs that we do are not all financial driven. We’ll take the number of terminations and the number of people who quit over a percentage, and usually it’s a rolling 12 months. And then sometimes those clients will also want to know what income can be allocated to each employee.
— Melissa Lenos, CPB, PCP, King Business Solutions

With these kinds of figures, she can create reports from which her clients can make informed decisions, such as how many employees to hire at a time and the financial implications of doing so. It also helps with showing a client how much statutory holiday pay is really costing them compared to the business revenue they bring in for that day.

Thanks to the reporting in Wagepoint, she’s able to pull this information together and provide her clients with a monthly or quarterly report.

Switching to Wagepoint during bookkeeping off-season.

Something Melissa loves about using Wagepoint is being able to get a client started on the software without having to worry about an immediate cost. Since there’s no charge until the first pay run, this gives her time to make sure her clients have the details they need in the software without rushing through it to beat a first-charge deadline.

Then there’s the ability to easily switch to Wagepoint at any time of the year. Trying to tackle a payroll setup right in the middle of busy tax season just isn’t ideal, but because Wagepoint has super simple year-to-date options, she can wait until the slower season.

I love the fact that it is so easy to switch in the middle of the year. I do not want to be switching payroll software January first when I’m trying to do T4s, and Wagepoint just makes it so easy to change mid-year when you’re not busy.
— Melissa Lenos, CPB, PCP, King Business Solutions

Being a payroll compliance practitioner and using Wagepoint.

Being designated a payroll compliance practitioner (PCP) means you have the know-how and the skillset to make sure you and your clients are meeting payroll’s legislative regulations.

For Melissa, Wagepoint makes that task even easier because the software supports compliance through its setup and the way it works, so she can focus on other areas with her clients, like understanding when something is a taxable benefit and needs to be set up that way. Or how a party, travel expense or even working remotely will impact payroll.

In other words, because of Wagepoint’s built-in payroll functionalities, she’s able to use her strengths as a practitioner elsewhere to help King Business Solution’s clients.

Payroll and bookkeeping harmony.

With Wagepoint and Xero on your side, Melissa, we’re confident you’ll continue to polish up small business payroll and shine on through bookkeeping. Thank you for including Wagepoint in your bookkeeping tech stack and using the Xero integration to keep things as simple as possible.

Try the Wagepoint and Xero integration.

Want to learn more about how Wagepoint and Xero can tag team your bookkeeping to simplicity and time-savings like it has for Melissa and King Business Solutions? Click below to get started.

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Written by Laura A. Barton

Laura is Wagepoint's Content Lead with a passion for storytelling. Although writing takes up a good chunk of her time, she can otherwise be found immersed in social media, reading, or binge-watching videos online.

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