The Small-business Checklist for Buying Payroll
What every small-business owner should check before buying a payroll solution

If you have staff, you need a payroll solution. But as small-business owners and managers know, you don’t want to get the wrong solution or spend too much time doing payroll every couple of weeks. Whether you’re managing a small retail shop or you’re the office manager for a medical office, you have much more on your plate than payroll.
That’s why it’s worth taking time in advance to evaluate your payroll solution and ensure that it is meeting your needs. Many payroll technologies are built for large organizations and have complex systems that small businesses are forced to navigate.
Here’s what you should be looking for to meet your small business’s payroll needs.
Business Payroll Solution
- Easy payroll navigation and processing
- Simple, predictable, and transparent pricing
- Unlimited payroll processing with employee direct deposit
- Payroll tax filing and remittance service
- Payroll reporting and dashboards
- Non-commissioned sales representatives
Time and Attendance
- Capture and cost employee hours worked
- Pre-integrated with payroll for ease of processing
- Time-off tracking
- Employee leave-of-absence management
- Elimination of overreporting of time worked
- Mobile app that creates efficiencies for managers and employees
Employee Self-service Portal
- Electronic pay stubs and W-2s
- Pay history review
- Online employee onboarding
- Mobile-friendly experience
- Request updates to basic profile information
- Improved employee experience
HR Support
- Ask an HR professional (email or hotline)
- 50-state online HR library
- Online employee handbook and job description builder
Running Your Business Is Tough. Payroll Shouldn’t Be.
Small businesses have enough challenges without fighting through complex payroll systems that were built for companies with thousands of employees. But you still need a solution that has all the features you need. Small businesses need a payroll solution that is:
Quick
Small businesses don’t want to spend time on payroll when they could be working on other important initiatives. A payroll solution built for them needs to prioritize efficiency.
Accurate
All of the speed and ease doesn’t matter if your payroll is wrong. Payroll solutions have to prioritize accuracy and help owners and managers reduce common payroll errors.
Easy
Owners and managers shouldn’t have to learn the ins and outs of a system. Instead, a payroll solution should be intuitive and easy to navigate.
Affordable
Of course, none of that matters if you can’t pay for it. Payroll solutions need to have easy to understand and predictable pricing, so you know what you’re spending every month.
Equip Payroll Is Built for Small Businesses Like Yours
Equip was created by Primepoint, a payroll and HR technology company with more than 20 years of experience serving clients of all sizes. Primepoint started as a small family business, so we know what it’s like to just get started.
Through our decades of experience, we found that small businesses needed different solutions than our larger clients and we decided to create Equip by Primepoint to offer the best solution specifically for smaller businesses.
That’s why small businesses are all Equip does.
