Sense with Cents

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Payroll is not just numbers on a check stub. It is the rules behind those numbers — the withholding calculations, the state-by-state differences, the deadlines that cost real money when they are missed — and the way the small business owner gets pulled around by people who are supposed to be helping.

This blog covers all three. Practical payroll questions, with the answers explained plainly. The behind-the-scenes view of how a small software company actually runs and what forty years of customer support sounds like. And the parts of the industry that small business owners are not usually told about — partner programs, conflicts of interest, recommendations that do not hold up under a second look. I write about what comes up. The full standing position is in Saying It Out Loud.

I am Dennis Pearson, developer of Medlin Payroll Software. My background is unusual for the work. I started as a professional mechanic, then ran a bakery, then learned payroll by doing it for small family businesses and for my own shop. When I partnered with Jerry Medlin to bring the software from DOS to Windows, I took over development within a year. I had already lived the problems the software needed to solve.

What makes the perspective on this blog different from most: I am an implementer of payroll rules, not a user of someone else's engine. I read the regulation, write the if-this-then-that, ship it, and field the edge cases when something does not behave the way a customer expected. That forces a deeper understanding than working with the rules at the desk level. We also use the software ourselves — Medlin has run its own payroll on it from the start, and we sit in the same chair as our customers every pay period. Forty years of doing it, plus more than 45,000 paid customers running over 100,000 businesses, is the other half of the education.