Intuit Online Payroll, our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award winner for online payroll services, is extremely adaptable. This service was called PayCycle before Intuit acquired and rebranded it. The service provides unlimited payroll runs covered by the monthly fee. It is exceptionally simple and intuitive to set up and use.
Intuit Online Payroll offers two monthly small business payroll plans. The most comprehensive is called Payroll Plus. It costs $42.99 per month for up to five employees. The monthly charge allows you to run payroll as often as you like. Most companies charge on a per payroll basis so if your company pays on a bi-weekly or semi-monthly basis, you have to double the quoted price to arrive at the monthly cost. Each additional employee costs $1.50 per month extra. Also, if the business has employees in more than one state, there is an additional $12 per month charge for each extra state. Those are the only factors needed to determine what the Intuit Online Payroll service costs.
Intuit's other payroll plan is called Payroll Basic. The only difference is that processing of state tax filings and deposits is not included in Payroll Basic.
Intuit Online Payroll also offers a plan for those who employ nannies or other household workers. For $19.99 monthly, you can insure that employees are paid properly and promptly, and you can see to it that all tax compliance issues are addressed.
It’s hard to imagine a system that’s much easier to use than that offered by Intuit Online Payroll. Intuit Online Payroll walks the user through an extremely logical and easy to use system for entering information. Creating a listing of employees, for example, is simple. Required entries such as name and Social Security Number are obvious but you can also enter the employees pay rate and type of compensation such as hourly or salary. In fact, there are 21 different types of pay that can be entered including sick and vacation pay, bonuses, overtime and just about any other possibility that can be imagined. Adding a new employee in a manner that is fully compliant with the Welfare Reform Act is just a matter of a mouse click. Once the above parameters are set up, processing payroll is simply a matter of entering hours for each employee and clicking approve.
There’s more to payroll than just getting pay to employees in a timely manner. There’s also the matter of tracking vacation and sick time, which Intuit Online Payroll does completely automatically based on parameters that have been established for each employee. It goes without saying that the system calculates pay as well as federal, state and local tax withholding automatically. But it goes further by making optional deductions such as for insurance and retirement plans. The system also calculates employer contributions.
Intuit Online Payroll helps keep the employer on track by presenting a “to do” list at each log on as well as by sending email reminders when events such as paydays or tax deposits are approaching.
Employers and employees have the option of either paper checks or direct deposit with Intuit Online Payroll. If a paper check is desired it can be printed immediately on the business computer. Paystubs can also be printed in this way and employees have the ability to see their stubs online.
For any business, taking care of the myriad federal, state and local payroll tax obligations is as essential a task as making sure that employees get paid properly. Meeting these tax requirements is often more complicated than making payroll itself but Intuit Online Payroll makes total compliance easy. Quarterly filings for all taxing agencies are automatic and there is an option to file electronically or to print signature-ready forms to be mailed. There’s also an option to make payments electronically or to print vouchers that can be mailed with a check. The system also reminds employers of upcoming requirements through the to-do list and via email. All of these functions are included in the monthly payroll fee. It costs extra for filings to more than one state.
When it comes time for annual production of Forms W-2, employee copies of the documents can be printed locally and there’s an option to file the federal, state and local copies electronically or with printed forms. This cost is included in the monthly payroll charge.
Intuit Online Payroll’s service offers unlimited customer support by both telephone and email. The website offers excellent demonstrations, webinars and informative FAQs.
Intuit Online Payroll not only completes payroll processing with a minimum of effort on the users part but shares its transactions with widely used accounting software including Quicken, QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online, Microsoft Money, Peachtree, CCH ProSystems fx Write-up and all ATX products. This feature eliminates the need for manual entry of payroll data into other accounting software programs. With a single click, Intuit Online Payroll data transfers to Excel spreadsheets.
Online payroll services offer a simple alternative to labor intensive manual payroll production as well as to the more traditional payroll outsourcing options, which can be expensive, especially for small businesses. Intuit Online Payroll is hard to beat.
