We’ve partnered with some very cool companies that help small businesses and startups grow and succeed. They'll be writing a series of posts about their areas of expertise on our blog. This "Featured Tech" piece introduces the company behind the advice.
What is Justworks?
Justworks is an online software platform to manage people, payments, benefits, and compliance insurance. We started Justworks to make it easy and affordable for businesses to hire and take care of people – freeing them to invest their time in what matters: Building their company. As a member of Justworks, we’ll take care of payroll for your team, and grant you access to insurance and benefits at a much lower rate than you would be able to on your own. We also ensure that you are compliant with federal, state and local filing requirements, without you having to stay on top of what’s required.
Justworks makes payments easier for your business, in a multitude of ways.
- We have automatic tax calculation, payment and filing, to make sure you are paying the correct federal, state and local taxes, anywhere in the United States.
- Your employees will love our automated direct deposit - electronic payments are easy, fast and error-free.
- Use Justworks to schedule bonuses, retroactive and off-cycle payments any time, and we’ll take care of making sure you pay the correct taxes.
- Pay your contractors easily through Justworks, and we’ll even send them a 1099 at the end of the year!
- You can even use Justworks to pay your invoices electronically and reduce the overhead in managing vendors. No matter where your employees live or work, Justworks has them covered.
What makes your company different?
Digital Ready | Get HR Online
Traditional HR requires paperwork, fax machines, licking envelopes, endless phone calls to state and federal agencies, and sprints to the mailbox. Justworks takes care of all of that hassle for you, while giving you all of the online tools you need to run your business. We make it easy to manage your employees’ payments and benefits online, without being sent to a bunch of other websites.
Employees have their own dedicated dashboard where they can manage their banking information, see payroll history and much more. Justworks also provides a private directory you can use for your company - no more searching (and updating) an employee contact list in Google Spreadsheets!
Responsiveness | Quick Answers to your HR Questions
We also offer Justworks Concierge service, which gives Justworks administrators access to an on-demand hotline staffed by HR professionals, for any HR question that comes up in your company, and an online portal to help you build employee handbooks, create job descriptions, create performance reviews, and more.
Justworks is proud to be a PEO (Professional Employment Organization). Working with a PEO can save companies both time and money in hiring staff that would be utilized to prepare payroll and administer benefits plans, and often times reduces legal liabilities or obligations to employees that your company would otherwise be liable for.
Affordability | Steeper Discounts on HR Services
By joining Justworks, companies are pooling their employees together with many others, allowing us to create more purchasing power and negotiate better plans with lower premiums than you would be able to negotiate on your own (or that a broker would be able to get for you).
Justworks members have access to reduced rates for Medical, Dental and Vision plans through the Justworks network, as well as access to commuter benefits, and 401(k) plans. We also utilize this “power in numbers” idea for your compliance coverage, including Workers’ Comp Insurance, Disability Insurance, and Unemployment Insurance, and more.
How Does Justworks Help Small Businesses?
33% of small businesses get fined for doing payroll incorrectly. We’re here to make sure that your business isn’t one of them. Seth Bannon, Y Combinator Alum and CEO and Founder of Amicus, wrote frankly about how his company owed well over half a million dollars in taxes and fines, for having done their payroll incorrectly.
Seth’s story may resonate with many small business owners: “I hired our first accountant this year. I knew our books hadn’t been well kept and was pretty sure we owed some state taxes. He determined we owed about $5,000 in state and local taxes, which we quickly paid. But shortly after, he noticed there hadn’t been any payroll tax payments coming out of our bank account. Impossible, I thought, Bank of America’s payroll system automatically withholds payroll taxes every month, it’s all automated. But it wasn’t. There was a single “submit tax” button in a separate part of the Bank of America website that had to be clicked to actually pay the taxes. And because the IRS had our old company name (“BlueFusion”) and address on file, we never got any notices. And so I learned that we hadn’t been paying payroll taxes for almost 3 years – a particularly painful thing given I believe in taxes as a means of giving back to society.”
“When all is said and done, cleaning up this mess (the taxes, the fines, the legal fees, etc.) cost the company over half a million dollars. And we had to pay the vast majority of that to the IRS immediately. Needless to say, such a huge financial shock severely hurt our runway and triggered many difficult changes. This hurt even more because I’d been paying myself one of the lowest salaries on the team to maximize our runway and support our mission, and with this mistake did just the opposite.”
“Financial operations aren’t my forté. I have little tolerance for paperwork, forms, or bookkeeping, and so had been putting off some operational tasks for too long – knowing this, I should have outsourced this as early as possible... Don’t cut corners here.”
From payroll to compliance and taxes to benefits to take care of your team, Justworks is here to help.
What Advice Would You Give a Small Business or Startup?
Starting a new business is a hard for many reasons, not the least of which is, you don’t know what you don’t know. Get things set up legally and compliantly from the beginning, to save yourself major headaches (and potential fines!) in the future.
Are Your Employees Classified Correctly?
We’ve actually published lots of guides on our blog to help you make the right decisions (whether you’re using Justworks or not), including how to tell the difference between an employee and a contractor, and what the federal government actually requires businesses to do when they set up payroll.
Slow Down: Spend Time on Your Business' Foundation
Our CEO Isaac Oates has also shared some of his insights, especially in his article for Entrepreneur Magazine about the 7 deadly sins of the eager entrepreneur, with advice about how to split equity amongst cofounders, trusting your gut, and not letting whims create whiplash for your company (and your team!).
We know that you most likely didn’t set up your company to do paperwork. No matter where your employees live or work in the U.S., Justworks has them covered, so that you can focus on building your company.