Business Bank accounts

What is a payroll account?

Panna Kemenes

05.12.22 (updated more than 1 year ago)

Read time 2 minutes

For businesses, it’s important to separate out finances to easily track expenses. A payroll account provides just that: a means to monitor how much you spend on employee wages.

Opening a payroll account can help save you time and better manage your company finances. You can even pay international employees from a single source, so you shouldn’t have to shift funds around when every payday comes around.

What is a payroll bank account?

A payroll account is a type of checking account that businesses can use solely to pay employee wages.

It can make the separation of business funds clear, and ensure there’s always money in the business to pay employees.

Why do I need a payroll account?

The main reason for a separate payroll bank account is to clearly define and separate your business funds.

While it’s not a requirement to set up a payroll account for your business, it can be beneficial when payroll is a significant component of the business.

What is a separate payroll account used for?

One of the biggest challenges for business owners is managing cash flow and balancing the books to support sustainable growth. With a payroll account, you can keep track of a significant outgoing cash flow source.

The payroll account can also help you give the reins over to the accounting department. They don’t need to access the main business account to retrieve the funds for employee wages.

Main account reciliation is another benefit of having a payroll account. It becomes easier to log expenses under various categories and file taxes as pertains to the money used for payroll.

Pros and Cons of having a separate payroll account

There are various benefits to having a separate payroll account, but it can also bring drawbacks:

Pros	Cons
Extra main business account security Straightforward reconciliation Easy record keeping	Some accounts may incur additional banking fees Multiple account management

Pros

Extra main business account security - When you create a separate payroll account, you reduce the paper trail of your main business account. As such, you can keep your main business account number secret when printing payroll checks.

Straightforward reconciliation - With an account dedicated only to payroll, it becomes much easier to reconcile payroll tax accounts.

Easy record keeping - When everything related to payroll is confined to a single account, maintaining records for individual employees is more straightforward.

Cons

Additional banking fees - Setting up an extra business account for payroll will typically incur additional fees. You might have to pay a monthly maintenance fee, for example.

Multiple account management - Balancing several accounts can be challenging, especially for rapidly-growing small businesses.

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