Paymaster Services

The California Arts Council (CAC) is a state agency with a mission of strengthening arts, culture, and creative expression as the tools to cultivate a better California for all. It supports local arts infrastructure and programming statewide through grants, initiatives, and services. The California Arts Council envisions a California where all people flourish with universal access to and participation in the arts. The CAC recognizes that Small Nonprofit Performing Arts Organizations (SNPAOs) create and preserve opportunities for performers and people in the performing arts sector, particularly workers in marginalized communities. These organizations are often the on-ramps for emerging performers and people entering the performing arts industries, and they are incubators for new works. SNPAOs present stories that resonate with and reflect the community, the artists, and the social context of the times. Because of historic undercapitalization of community-based arts and the effects of

prolonged shutdowns, SNPAOs are reducing the number of people they hire and the number of programs they offer. Their mission to make theater accessible through low ticket prices and free services, means that most of these organizations cannot cover the costs of production and administration through tickets sales alone and must, on average, raise funds to cover 40 to 60 percent of the costs of each production. Each SNPAO creates an average of 64 jobs annually for a cumulative average of 121,436 jobs created by the sector each year. Many paymaster companies have been charging fees that can drive the employment premium for California nonprofits as high as 30 percent because they are not set-up for small nonprofits. Substantial savings can be achieved by funding regional nonprofit and arts services organizations to act as production worker administration hubs for nonprofits, starting with payroll services. It is, therefore, the intent of the CAC to fund paymaster and payroll services so that small nonprofits can have access to the same administrative services that will keep them compliant with state employment laws while lessening the administrative burden in staffing and costs for organizations.