At a glance
Meghan Cooper has run payroll by hand. She’s run it on enterprise platforms built for a different scale of business. And she runs it on Wagepoint. Only one of those made her stop shopping around.
Today, Wagepoint is the preferred payroll partner at MC Bookkeeping, her Hamilton, ON practice spanning legal bookkeeping, not-for-profits, and events clients. She runs it for several clients, including her own business, and is actively moving more clients over from other systems; a shift she says saves her up to an hour on every pay run compared to what she used before.
Wagepoint found her first
Meghan’s start with payroll wasn’t planned. Years ago, at a company where the HR person quit without notice, someone had to take it over fast. She figured it out, then got the training to back it up, a skill that followed her all the way into the practice she runs today.
Initially, Meghan’s experience with payroll software was limited to platforms built for enterprise-scale companies, even for her small business clients. Then she took on a client already running on Wagepoint, got her admin login, and ran her first pay run.
“It was a revelation. My experience up to this point has always been the big international players like ADP and Ceridian, which are fine. They work, they’re great. But for a small business, they’re really, really complex.”
She hasn’t needed to look for an alternative since.
Up to 1 hour back, every pay run
Compared to the “other guys” she used before, Meghan says Wagepoint cuts her time on each pay run roughly in half, mainly due to the simple, intuitive workflows.
“Even the most routine payroll, with all the necessary checks and balances, can save anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour when I use Wagepoint.”
Here’s the real impact she’s seeing.
Making payroll boring, on purpose
For Meghan, the whole point of good payroll software is that it gives you nothing to talk about.
“Did everybody get paid? That’s success. Did the government also get paid, with the appropriate reporting? Success. And did you have to think about it? Not a bit.”
These are the Wagepoint features that make that possible:
- Ease of use. The system is so simple, anyone can use it. “I call it the hit-by-a-bus rule. If something happened to me tomorrow and somebody else had to walk in and do it, without any of the historical information I have, they’d be able to do it without having to contact support.”
- Automated pay runs and source deductions. Meghan says her biggest Wagepoint win was moving a not-for-profit client off manual payroll, previously capped by daily e-transfer limits and slowed by confusion over filing source deductions. “I encouraged them to put a financial value to their time, especially when remembering how to file source deductions properly.”
- Custom income and deduction types. Adding profit sharing, gratuities, or a one-off deduction – at any time during the cycle or year – takes a few clicks.
- Quick records of employment. Processing an ROE is one of her favourite parts of the platform. Meghan calls it, “Wow, chef’s kiss. Wonderful. So simple.”
- The in-app chatbot (aka Digit). Meghan loves to ask questions, and in Wagepoint, she doesn’t have to contact support each time.
“The chatbot and I are besties. Out of all the automated tools I’ve used in my career, that’s the only one where the answer is actually available, and it’s actually right.”
Actually taking a vacation
That kind of boring is exactly what let Meghan leave her practice behind on a family trip to Alberta. Mid-trip, a client emailed with a payroll question.
“I just popped out my computer, put it on my girlfriend’s kitchen island, logged into Wagepoint, confirmed everything was fine, and got back to the client. Five minutes of my life, and I knew exactly where to go,” she says.
Five minutes, from a kitchen island a few provinces away, and she was back to her vacation.
Why she recommends Wagepoint over the competition
Meghan doesn’t hold back when fellow bookkeepers ask for payroll recommendations. “I would just be right up in their business about Wagepoint constantly,” she says. After years split across corporate finance, legal bookkeeping, and a growing roster of small business clients, she’s used enough payroll systems to know which ones are worth switching to.
For one client, Meghan was so confident in Wagepoint that she offered to waive her own fees for moving them over. She saw it as a small upfront investment in a much better way of working.
“I just want you to use Wagepoint,” she told them. “I just want you to see what this can do for you.”
The offer was as savvy as it was bold. Meghan knew Wagepoint would make it remarkably simple to get the client up and running, while making her life easier with every payroll that followed.
Right-sized software, real time back
Wagepoint is built for the businesses bookkeepers actually work with: simple enough to learn in a few pay cycles, right-sized for what small business payroll really requires, and just as precise where compliance matters. For Meghan, that adds up to an hour back per pay run. For your practice, it could mean the difference between payroll eating your week and payroll barely registering.
If you’re a bookkeeper or accountant still running payroll the way Meghan used to, on a system built for a different scale of business, see what switching to right-sized payroll could do for your practice.
