Payroll management is a complex process for any business — but it doesn’t have to be.
Utilizing payroll templates for businesses can simplify payroll while ensuring accuracy and organization.
This guide will explore the fundamentals and benefits of payroll templates, provide an overview of the best templates across various platforms, and offer actionable recommendations on implementing them into your payroll system.
Whether you’re a solopreneur handling payroll yourself or a rapidly scaling startup with an expanding team, this guide has a payroll template fit for your business needs.
Follow along to discover the template that will suit your payroll needs, boost productivity, and retain top talent through accurate and timely compensation. Let’s get started!
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What Is A Payroll Template?
Payroll templates are digital frameworks or documents created to streamline and automate the payroll process.
Each template often includes a place to enter payroll information for each employee, including employee name, pay period, salary, and timesheet. Including HR software for payroll introduces seamless and efficient automation to payroll management, complementing the flexibility of templates for payroll. While all templates are well organized and easy to read, some have added functionality, including calculating with formulas, managing schedules with calendars, time tracking, and adding customizable features.
Best Payroll Templates For Businesses
1 Payroll Summary Report
✅ Available on: ClickUp
🏅 Best for: Small teams, remote teams, HR professionals, small to medium-sized business owners, and freelance managers
The payroll summary report maintains sensitive employee information necessary for payroll. Once inputted, the payroll budget template completes the fields in the payroll check template, which can be printed or issued as a direct deposit. Additional report templates on Google Sheets allow payroll management for various workflows, which can be documented using Gantt charts and calendars.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: Ensure everyone’s on the same page when calculating salaries and keeping track of employee pay.
Did you know? While giving employees incentive gifts, the IRS distinguishes between large and small gifts. Small gifts, like those found in employee benefits software, are “de minimus” and, therefore, untaxed. However, large incentives with tax implications must be recorded on payroll templates.
2 Check Stub Template
✅ Available on: monday.com
🏅 Best for: Employers of either full-time or hourly employees or the self-employed
👉 Try This monday.com Template
This digital check stub contains the exact same information as a paper pay stub, including wages, work hours, deductions like taxes and reimbursements, and other essential details. The digital version is designed to reduce occasional errors with paper stubs.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: It saves time each week by making employee payroll a matter of filling out a pay stub template, which the template will calculate with its built-in formulas.
3 Payroll Report
✅ Available on: ClickUp
🏅 Best for: Large organizations with several teams
A template that excels at staying organized through color coding payroll processing status updates. All of the necessary payroll data is included in the template. You can create a pay slip as a paper copy or by direct deposit when sending the paycheck.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: It provides an organized chart for accurate payroll calculations to be quickly checked for inaccuracies.
4 Commission Tracking Template
✅ Available on: Wrike
🏅 Best for: Commission-based teams
Keep track of commission-based sales from start to finish. This template has an organized system for increasing leads, determining new pricing rates, and marking new business leads with status tags like “Contact Made,” “Negotiation Started,” and “Closed.”. Accurately monitor different commission rates for each deal and accurately calculate future commission payments.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: It enables you to track commissions on multiple levels while ensuring your team members are paid monthly.
5 Payroll Register Template
✅ Available on: Smartsheet
🏅 Best for: Small and medium in-person teams
👉 Try This Smartsheet Template
The Payroll Register Template is a central place to input employee information to calculate employee salaries, gross pay, and net pay that factor in tax withholdings and other deductions. Monitor and adjust to time off requests, sick leave, and vacation hours.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: It allows for flexibility while maintaining accurate employee records.
6 Certified Wage and Hourly Payroll
✅ Available on: Smartsheet
🏅 Best for: Contractors and subcontractors
👉 Try This Smartsheet Template
This certified wage form is for contractors and subcontractors. It follows federal guidelines, including an OMB number, project number, and work classification. Its additional fields include exemptions, hourly wages, employee timesheets, rates, gross earnings, and deductions.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: The Certified Wage and Hourly Payroll Template is a comprehensive way to pay employees, with frontside work details and backside signature fields.
7 Vacation Tracker Template
✅ Available on: monday.com
🏅 Best for: Small teams, medium teams, or remote teams
👉 Try This monday.com Template
Make tracking days off simpler with this customizable, easy-to-use template. You can track requests for vacation and time off, fast-track approvals, and prevent payroll errors. This intuitive vacation tracker template allows employees to easily submit their requests and receive a notification when you approve or deny them. And, if a request is pending longer than expected, you can easily set automatic reminders. Get a high-level overview of vacation days, company-wide. Create custom forms for employees to submit leave requests.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: It makes a powerful addition to any HR Tool Kit, and should you consider the use of employee tracking software, this data can be integrated into the payroll template.
8 Monthly Payroll Template
✅ Available on: Quickbooks
🏅 Best for: Small teams
👉 Try This Quickbooks Template
Keep track of pay periods from a weekly to a monthly basis, and mark payroll tax deadlines. With a color-coded key, the calendar will tell you which forms are due on specific dates. For your convenience, they can be created as PDFs, in Microsoft Excel and Word, and Google Docs.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: A dedicated Excel payroll template that keeps track of weekly, biweekly, and monthly payroll keeps your pay schedule on track.
9 Pay Raise Planner
✅ Available on: Miro
🏅 Best for: Individuals seeking a pay raise
The Pay Raise Planner is the quintessential checklist to use before you ask your boss for a raise. Navigate your way to a more rewarding compensation package with the Pay Raise Planner, created by hiring managers who have hired over 1,000 people. Completing this planner will give you solid and effective selling points of why you deserve a raise. Walk into your compensation negotiation meeting with confidence and be ready to advocate for your worth.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: This comprehensive and strategic template empowers you to identify and articulate your value, align your expectations with industry standards, and structure your negotiation points effectively.
Start here: Pay Raise Planner
10 Compensation Negotiation Guide
✅ Available on: Miro
🏅 Best for: Individuals seeking a pay raise
Make progress in closing the gender pay gap by attaining every merited pay increase. This template invites you to assess your current leverage to best prepare for a productive, dynamic conversation regarding compensation with a manager or prospective company. On this board, you will find instructions and a sample case to guide you in your negotiation.
🚀 Why this is an effective payroll template: The more comfortable you can become negotiating armed with data, context, preparation, and clarity, the better equipped you’ll be to succeed.
Benefits of Using Payroll Templates
✅ Employee Retention
Paying employees an accurate wage on time is the backbone of retaining them long-term, and all organizations should consider using enterprise HR software.
✅ Pair with Human Resources
HR templates include payroll and employee onboarding tools, providing your HR team with a streamlined approach to payroll.
✅ Streamlined Management
Templates can be bundled into larger HRIS Systems. Both employers and employees can easily access templates that are part of HR systems through mobile HR apps. You can share your template with an outsourced accounting service or link it with different HR software for small businesses.
✅ Customizable
You can modify existing templates to account for business growth, changes in tax code, and salary changes.
✅ Time and Cost Savings
These digital templates lower payroll costs while improving the speed of manual payroll processing.
Conclusion
Free payroll templates can act as standalone services or be part of a payroll system. Startups considering payroll software for startups can gain comparable functionality to paid payroll services, with added features to integrate into onboarding templates when hiring new employees. As your organization grows into a small to midsize business, the best templates account for the fact that you may employ full-time, contract, and remote employees.
If the opportunity to hire international employees and handle a global payroll arises, payroll templates offer features of global payroll software. In this case, ensure you comply with international laws and regulations by hiring an Employer of Record Service to bring your payroll template into full legal compliance.
People Also Ask These Questions About Payroll Templates
Q: What are the key features to look for in payroll templates for employees?
- A: Look for payroll template features that document employee salary information, calculate gross and net pay following legal guidelines, and incorporate taxes and deductions. Beyond this, other key features are pay date calendars and time-off tracking.
Q: How can payroll software templates improve payment efficiency?
- A: Payroll software templates improve payment efficiency by automating calculations, saving employee information, and documenting employee salaries, taxes, and deductions. Together, they streamline company payroll for each payment cycle and minimize delays.
Q: Can payroll templates be customized?
- A: Yes, payroll templates can be customized to cater to different businesses’ specific needs and structures. You can adjust variables such as pay periods, hourly rates, pay rates, tax rates, and deduction categories.
