At a glance
Every other Saturday morning, Dr. Melanie Little makes herself a coffee, settles in at home, and runs payroll for her nine-person team at Roncy Dental Studio. About 15 minutes later, she’s done. Her weekends stay simple, and her clinic days stay focused on her patients.
Here’s how she did it while building her busy practice.
From dentist to business owner
Dr. Little opened Roncy Dental Studio in Toronto’s Roncesvalles neighbourhood in 2024 after 20 years as a dentist. She knew how to make patients feel at ease in the chair, but had no background in payroll or compliance.
“We’re trained how to do dentistry,” she says. “Not how to run a small business.”
Today, Roncy Dental serves between 60 and 80 patients a week with a team that includes dentists, hygienists, assistants, front desk staff, an oral surgeon and an acupuncturist.
That team supports the kind of neighbourhood practice Dr. Little wanted to build from the start: a small, family-friendly practice that feels like dropping in on a friend. Many of Dr. Little’s patients have followed her over the years, from kindergarten check-ups to university graduations, and appointments often start with, “How is your mom?”
But running that kind of clinic also means making time for the work patients do not see.
“As a small business, if I’m not doing dentistry, I’m not making money,” Dr. Little says. “So the hard thing about running a clinic for me is finding time to do things like payroll. I don’t get paid to do payroll. I have to do it though.”
That made time her biggest challenge. Payroll needed to be accurate. It also needed to be simple enough to manage outside clinic hours.
A payroll setup built for a dental team
Before opening her own practice, Dr. Little had no prior knowledge of payroll. “I’d give myself a one (out of 10), because I knew I had to take taxes off,” she laughs.
But dental office payroll comes with a lot of moving parts.
At Roncy Dental Studio, Dr. Little runs payroll for a team with different roles, pay rates and schedules. Hours vary each week and no two paydays are exactly the same. Vacation accrual, statutory holiday calculations and occasional adjustments all need to be handled correctly. So Dr. Little knew she needed payroll software that could handle Canadian payroll rules without requiring her to become a payroll expert.
She did have one advantage: her husband, who also runs a dental clinic, was already happily using Wagepoint. She did her own research, wanting a software built for the way Canadian dental clinics actually operate. Wagepoint fit on every count: simple interface, automated tax calculations, straightforward T4s, and Canadian through and through. For a business deeply rooted in community, that mattered.
Payroll setup came at crunch time for Roncy Dental. Dr. Little’s team was starting in two days, and payroll had to be ready. Within 30 minutes of signing up, someone from Wagepoint called to walk her through the whole system, and she was on her way to running her first payroll.
Keeping paydays simple at Roncy Dental
Once Roncy Dental Studio was set up in Wagepoint, payroll became part of Dr. Little’s routine rather than something she had to figure out from scratch each time.
Her team sends in their hours, she enters the numbers, reviews the details and submits payroll. Wagepoint handles the calculations behind the scenes, including deductions and vacation accrual.
“It really wasn’t that difficult,” she says. “Once it’s set up, it was really just put in the numbers and hit ‘send’. It was kind of plug and play, really.”
A few features made it especially easy:
Self-onboarding
When bringing on new employees, Dr. Little saves time by entering their basic information and inviting them into Wagepoint to fill in their own details and upload their own tax forms.
Employee transparency
One of the things Dr. Little notices most is what she doesn’t hear about. When employees can see their own hours, pay, and paystubs in real time, they catch discrepancies themselves, and her inbox stays clear.
Corrections and off-cycle payroll
Mistakes happen. When Dr. Little once accidentally forgot to exclude herself from Employment Insurance (EI), the fix was painless. “I just left a message for Wagepoint’s support team and it was fixed,” she says. Off-cycle adjustments are equally low-friction. “If I’ve had to change something, that’s been pretty easy.”
Automated Records of Employment (ROEs)
When a team member has an interruption in earnings, an ROE needs to be sent to Service Canada. In two and a half years, Dr. Little has only had to process one, but the process was simple. “I just had to hit ‘send’ on the ROE and it was done,” she says.
Year-end T4s
Ask Dr. Little what she loves most about Wagepoint and the answer is immediate: year-end.
Her team can check their Wagepoint employee portals for anything they need at tax time, without the questions landing on her desk.
From onboarding a new team member to navigating year-end, Dr. Little has a payroll process she can understand, trust, and keep moving.
Spending time on patients, not payroll
For Dr. Little, the biggest challenge of running her own practice has never been the dentistry itself. It’s the time.
Because payroll can only happen outside of clinic hours, keeping it manageable to a short weekend morning makes the difference between admin eating into her week or not. “I can put time into my practice as opposed to time into my payroll,” she says.
That’s the real return on Wagepoint: not just the time saved per pay run, but the mental load that never follows her back through the clinic door.
And, as her practice grows, she’s not worried about payroll keeping up. She’s got the system. She’s got the routine.
The coffee will be hot. The laptop will be open. And 15 minutes later, everyone will be paid.
Make a dent in payroll stress
Dr. Little would recommend Wagepoint to other dental clinics and small business owners without hesitation, particularly those who, like her, came to ownership through a profession rather than a business degree. The setup is fast, the learning curve is gentle, and once it’s running, it stays out of the way.
Let us handle the complexity so you don’t have to.
