It’s tough running a restaurant these days. Obviously, you’re dealing with the usual pressures — high turnover, thin profit margins, constantly changing customer preferences.
But today, dramatic changes in immigration policies, tariff rates, and tax rules are making these challenges even more difficult to manage. The pressures and uncertainties of running a restaurant are greater than ever.
So how exactly can state-of-the-art restaurant payroll services help you? Well, for one thing, the top payroll services already have a ton of experience dealing with constantly changing rules. These may be unprecedented times for restaurants, but ProLiant’s National Director of Sales, Enterprise & National Partnerships Clay Larkin explains that “For us, a lot of this is just business as usual.”
ProLiant is a leading provider of payroll services. And during 25 years of operation, ProLiant has evolved into a provider of countless innovative restaurant HR solutions. We caught up with Clay to find out exactly how the right restaurant payroll services can help your business stay on track and even thrive during these unprecedented times.
Before founding ProLiant, CEO Kevin Clayton worked as a CPA. This experience gave him an appreciation for the challenges and complexities of payroll management. When he launched ProLiant, his goal was to simplify this process with the help of the industry’s sharpest software designers.
Over time, ProLiant’s service offerings grew to include all kinds of smart HR solutions. These tools turned out to be a great fit for restaurants. In fact, says Clay, “ProLiant does payroll for about 40 percent of all the McDonald's in the U.S., so we do a lot in the QSR field.”
ProLiant’s restaurant HR solutions include performance management tools, employee engagement tools, learning management software, tip pooling, benefits administration, and a lot more. But Clay explains that it’s really the customer-first approach that has helped to make ProLiant one of the top restaurant payroll service providers.
“We happen to write really, really good software,” says Clay, “But our foundation has always been that we are a people-first type of company.”
This people-centered approach is more important than you might realize when it comes to your payroll system. Why? Because if you’ve ever tried to handle payroll, tip pooling, benefits, and compliance for your restaurant, you know that all this stuff can be very complicated and very time consuming.
You also know that all those big policy changes coming down from Washington aren’t making life any easier. So let’s take a look at a few ways that customer-focused restaurant payroll services can help.
There are a lot of payroll providers out there, but few of them are built with the needs of restaurant owners in mind. In contrast, says Clay, “a lot of the integrations we've put together, and a lot of the software tools that we've developed, have been really hyper-focused for restaurants and hospitality.”
Clay notes that ProLiant begins the implementation process with every client by asking two critical questions: “What does the restaurant tech ecosystem look like? And where do we fit into that?” Integrations shouldn’t be an afterthought when it comes to your payroll provider, or any of your restaurant HR solutions, for that matter. As a customer-focused provider, ProLiant puts integrations up front.
The vast majority of restaurant transactions are now done by credit card, but many restaurants still handle a lot of cash. That’s because cash-in-hand is a big draw for restaurant workers. “There's this idea of attracting and retaining talent by still giving them cash at the end of the night,” says Clay.
But most restaurants are trying to move away from cash. “Restaurants hate having cash,” says Clay. “In a cash-based system, you’re sending a manager to get cash every single night at the bank, or paying for an armored service to bring cash every day or once a week.”
ProLiant invented a tip disbursement tool that lets restaurants move away from cash while making sure that employees can still get tipped out after every shift. With ProLiant, every employee gets access to a personal in-app wallet. At the end of every shift, ProLiant’s tip disbursement system automatically calculates tips and sends payment directly to each employee’s virtual wallet.
Staying on top of compliance requirements can be a constant stress on restaurant owners, especially with so many new rules and regulations at the federal level. But Clay says it goes deeper than that. Restaurant owners actually have a responsibility to make sure that they are handling payroll processing correctly at the state, county and local levels as well.
For instance, says Clay, the city of Chicago, Cook County, and the state of Illinois all have slightly different rules about issues like taxation and paid time off. It is particularly important for restaurants to use restaurant payroll services that understand and account for these differences.
Rules and regulations in this business can create a complicated patchwork of requirements and risks. This is why, says Clay, “any time we see state-mandated or local policies that affect things like payroll, HR, and taxes, we're going to build requirements into the software. We also send out communication to our clients about updates at the state, local, and federal level that might affect them.”
ProLiant does offer a complete spectrum of restaurant HR solutions. But Clay acknowledges that this full 360 package doesn’t make sense for every client. While small and independent restaurants have just as much to gain from restaurant payroll services as a massive business like McDonald’s, they may not need all the same bells and whistles.
This is why it’s so important to work with a customer-first payroll company. “With ProLiant,” says Clay, “we’re going to come in and get an understanding of your primary, secondary, and tertiary needs. Then we’ll ask, ‘What can we do with the budget that we have?’”
The answer will be different for every restaurant, but ultimately, every restaurant shares the same basic challenge. “We’ve learned by working with so many McDonald’s locations that the margins are really, really thin in this business,” Clay observes. “So we understand how to fit our service offerings into those margins, regardless of a restaurant’s size.”
That’s the kind of understanding and flexibility that you only get from a customer-focused provider.
There’s a ton to keep track of if you’re doing your restaurant payroll in-house, including paycheck distribution, tip disbursement, taxes, and compliance. Things only get more complicated when you add in benefits like paid time off and earned wage access (EWA), which is a benefit that allows employees to access part of their earned wages before payday.
In fact, it can all be overwhelming if you’re doing it by yourself. That’s why it’s so important to work with a provider with a reputation for excellent customer service.
“ProLiant’s first organizational pillar is access to people,” Clay explains. “This means that every client actually gets a name, a direct-dial phone number, and the email of a subject matter expert for every product that they have.”
Thinking about adding advanced payroll services, shift scheduling tools, or other HR tools to your tech stack? Tell us what you’re working with and what you need. Our resident restaurant tech experts will walk you through your options and get you hooked up with the right HR solutions for your business.
What exactly does that mean? As a restaurant owner, you may rely on your technology, but you certainly don’t have the time to mess around with it. You depend on effective integration across your tech stack. You need a payroll system that “talks” to your POS (point of sale), your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), your scheduling system, and more.