Payroll set up correctly the first time, contractors classified honestly, an owner salary you can defend, and a retirement plan that doubles as one of the largest deductions available to a profitable practice.
Two decisions cause most of the damage we see, and neither of them feels risky at the time.
The first is paying yourself a token S-corp salary because someone in a Facebook group said the lower the better. Reasonable compensation is not a preference. It is a standard, and a salary that cannot be justified against what your role would earn elsewhere is the single biggest red flag the IRS looks for in an S corporation.
The second is paying clinicians on a 1099 because it is simpler. It usually is simpler, right up until someone files for unemployment and a state agency asks who set their schedule, whose EHR they used, whose office they sat in, and whose clients they saw. Back taxes, penalties and interest accrue for the whole period, not from the date you were asked.
Get these two right and payroll becomes what it should be: a scheduled, unremarkable process that funds your retirement plan on the way through.
Setup, oversight and strategy. We are not a payroll bureau running your cheques, we make sure the platform is configured correctly, the numbers are defensible and the whole thing feeds your books and your tax plan.
Most practice owners meet payroll for the first time in one of two ways: they hire someone, or they elect S corporation status and discover they now have to hire themselves.
Every person the practice pays (you, clinicians, admin, contractors) and on what basis. This is where classification problems surface, and where an S-corp owner salary gets tested against something more rigorous than a rule of thumb.
State registrations, pay schedules, deductions and benefits configured properly, integrated with your books so payroll posts itself. If you already run payroll, we fix what is misconfigured instead of starting over.
Once salary is settled, we size a retirement plan against your profit and cash flow, because for most profitable practices it is the largest remaining deduction available, and it only works if it is funded on schedule.
