Payroll Without the Paperwork

First, a Straight Statement About Our Role

EBS is not a payroll company, and we do not provide payroll. For our merchants, payroll runs through payroll partners — Gusto, Homebase, and Roll by ADP. What EBS does is set it up alongside your payments, so the way your people clock in, get paid, and get reported to the government stops being three separate headaches. This track teaches the whole picture, including the parts no provider can do for you.

What Payroll Actually Includes

Payday is the visible part. Payroll itself is five jobs running at once: calculating gross-to-net pay; withholding the employee's share — federal and state income tax, Social Security, and Medicare; adding the employer's own taxes on top; depositing all of it with the IRS and your state on schedule; and filing the returns that prove it, through the year-end forms your team takes to their own taxes. The math on any single paycheck is not hard. What owners underestimate is the filing calendar wrapped around it — a rhythm of deposits and deadlines that runs whether business is busy or slow, and that penalizes forgetting far more than it penalizes arithmetic.

W-2 or 1099: The Classification Line

Before anyone gets paid, decide what they are. The line is control: if you set the schedule, direct how the work gets done, and provide the tools, the IRS generally sees an employee — W-2 — no matter what the worker agreed to be called. A genuine independent contractor runs their own business, controls how the work is done, and typically serves other clients; that is 1099 territory. Misclassification is expensive, and the bill lands on the business, not the worker: back taxes, back withholding, and penalties. When the answer is genuinely in doubt, treat the worker as W-2 and get advice before the first check — not after the first audit letter.

The Deadline Rhythm

Payroll taxes move on the government's calendar, not yours. Deposits of withheld taxes come due monthly or semiweekly, depending on your liability — your provider tells you which schedule you are on — and the deposit is due whether or not the cash feels available that week. Form 941 reports wages and payroll taxes quarterly. Form 940 covers federal unemployment once a year, and W-2s go to your employees and the Social Security Administration by January 31. Late deposits are where small businesses bleed: the penalty starts at 2% of the deposit and climbs to 15% the longer it sits, plus interest. The withholdings were never your money — you held them in trust. A system that drafts and deposits automatically is not a luxury; it is how the rhythm stops depending on memory.

Payroll Starts at the Time Clock

Nearly every pay error starts as an hours error: a missed punch, an unapproved edit, overtime nobody noticed until the run went out. Wrong hours in means wrong pay out, and corrections cost more than the original run. That is why the time clock matters as much as the payroll engine behind it. Homebase's time tracking feeds hours straight into payroll, so what gets approved is what gets paid. Which leaves the owner exactly one weekly job: approve the hours before the run. Fifteen minutes of review that prevents the most common payroll mistake there is.

Choosing How to Run It

Three ways our merchants run payroll, all through partners we set up next to your processing:

Gusto — $39/mo + $6/person, with the first 3 months free. The full-service default: deposits, filings, and year-end forms handled, with room to grow into benefits administration.

Homebase — payroll $35/mo + $5/person. The natural fit when your team already clocks in on Homebase — and for Clover merchants, the time clock itself is free.

Roll by ADP — $24/mo + $5/employee after 3 free months for Clover merchants. The leanest price of the three, backed by ADP's filing machinery.