Jade Racicot knew it was time for a change after being hit with a $1,200 tax penalty.
Ms. Racicot, owner of Orleans, Ont.-based Golden Fries & The Grilled Cheeserie, is a 24-year-old entrepreneur with a booming business. She is building a food truck empire, having bought her first — a beat-up 1981 chip van — in 2009, before the craze took off.
She paid for the van with $7,500, saved from her bartending job, renovated it, and began selling burgers and fries. This year, having retired “old golden,” she added her third custom-made food truck — and she did it all without a dime of external funding. Her vans sell gooey favourites such as grilled cheese sandwiches and poutine to crowds at festivals, work events and even weddings.
Ms. Racicot may be able to keep multiple vans and hotplates running, but she wasn’t doing so well with her payroll. She would pay her employees on time, but payroll deduction remittances were a nightmare for the busy, paperwork-averse entrepreneur.
“I was paying eventually, it was just that getting the paperwork to them didn’t fit with my schedule, especially in the summer,” she said. Her business is seasonal, meaning that she works up to 100 hours a week in the summer, and shuts down for the winter.
“I would get the payroll done so that I could pay the employees, and then I’d leave the rest to tomorrow,” she recalled. “But tomorrow never came.” Eventually, it did, though — along with a two-year payroll audit.
A year ago, Ms. Racicot found Wagepoint, an online payroll management service that lets business owners pay their staff and file their payroll deductions from their mobile phones.
That’s important for busy entrepreneurs that don’t have time for long, drawn-out processes with large payroll companies, said Shrad Rao, Wagepoint’s chief executive.
Wagepoint handles staff payments through Royal Bank of Canada filing the paperwork and tax remittances with Canada Revenue Agency on its customers’ behalf. The company worked hard to forge partnerships with tax authorities in every Canadian province, and U.S. state.
The service is useful for small businesses who have to stay nimble. Ms. Racicot’s business is a prime example. “Food service is a low margin, no-contract business,” Mr. Shrao said, and employee turnover can be high.
“If you have a new employee to add into the system, we need three things, and that’s it: your bank account, your payment amount, and your SIN number (and even that can come later).”
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