by Steve Kowalski | Jun 18, 2026 | Industry Payroll
I’ve run payroll for hundreds of restaurants across Southwest Florida. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that restaurant owners who try to manage payroll themselves — or who use a generic payroll service that doesn’t understand the...
by Steve Kowalski | Jun 18, 2026 | Informational
A Fort Myers restaurant owner called me last year after getting a notice from the IRS. He’d missed a payroll tax deposit by four days while dealing with a family emergency. Four days. The penalty was over $800 on a $20,000 payroll. He didn’t know the...
by Steve Kowalski | Jun 12, 2026 | Informational
I spent nine years at Paychex. I know exactly how payroll pricing works — and more importantly, I know how it gets presented to business owners in a way that obscures the real number until the invoice shows up. If you’re a Fort Myers small business owner trying...
by Steve Kowalski | Jun 12, 2026 | Informational
Electing S-Corp status is one of the most popular tax strategies for Fort Myers small business owners. The math is straightforward: profit that flows through as distributions avoids self-employment tax. For an owner earning $150,000, that can mean saving...
by Steve Kowalski | Jun 12, 2026 | Informational
I want to be upfront about something: this post is about my experience inside one of the biggest payroll companies in the country. I spent nine years at Paychex — started as a Payroll Consultant, worked my way up to District Sales Manager. I worked with thousands of...
by Steve Kowalski | Apr 30, 2026 | Informational
A company intranet is a private internal network. Usually cloud based, this setup is designed to increase employee engagement because it allows people to communicate, share knowledge and collaborate on work-related tasks in real time no matter where they are. There...
by Steve Kowalski | Apr 15, 2026 | Informational
It is too late to ban your employees from using AI altogether, nor should you necessarily want to. Its capabilities can allow them to accomplish tasks with speed and efficiency hitherto barely imagined. As a tool, it can turbocharge productivity, much as computers...
by Steve Kowalski | Apr 10, 2026 | Informational
This guide explains how much payroll services cost for small businesses and provides a complete breakdown of payroll costs, including taxes, software, employee benefits, and service fees. For many businesses, payroll costs for small businesses go well beyond the wages...
by Steve Kowalski | Mar 31, 2026 | Informational
Before you can determine whether an individual providing services should be treated as an employee or an independent contractor, you must consider all the relevant facts regarding the degree of control you have over the worker and the amount of independence the worker...
by Steve Kowalski | Mar 24, 2026 | All
Employers are often not enthusiastic when employees are called for jury duty; after all, the employee is not allowed to refuse the summons (though they are sometimes allowed to postpone it), so their absence will have to be covered at work. But while federal law does...
