Getting set up

Eleven steps, in the order they genuinely depend on each other. There is nowhere to put a pay schedule before there is a legal entity, and no pay date to choose before there is a schedule — so the checklist will not let you start a step whose prerequisite is missing, and says which one it is waiting on rather than greying itself out silently.

Four questions at the beginning change the list. Say this is your first payroll and a fifteen-minute step about prior wages disappears entirely, because it does not apply to you. Say you have run payroll elsewhere this year and it appears, because getting it wrong means a W-2 that does not reconcile.

Every step saves as you go and every step tells you roughly how long it takes before you start it. Set-up gets abandoned in the middle far more often than it gets abandoned at the start, and almost always because somebody opened a step without knowing it needed a document they did not have to hand.