461 The Only Payroll Software Accounting Firms Should Use

Today, the only payroll software your accounting firm should be using to serve clients. Oh, payroll software. Bo, this guy really running a Monday episode of this podcast about payroll software. Does he want anybody to listen to his podcast? Okay, I know, I know, listen. It's not sexy, but it's an important decision. And it's hard because I racked up a list of 18 different options here. 18 payroll software enters payroll software's enter. Only 6 will remain as potential options for you. Let's talk about it. Payroll software. Okay, today's recommendations are from my big old fat app database. It's over 100 apps for accounting firms. Whether I recommend them or whether I don't and most importantly, why. And if there is one service I can provide to you firm running friend, it is to be the filter of all the firms that I talk about, talk about, talk with because boy do I hear some things. And every time we do an episode like this is a great example. We're going to talk about peril software today. People are going to drop helpful things in the comments that will then inform my recommendations. And so this resource, which you can grab down in the show notes, this resource is the condensation. Nope. The collection and the synthesization of all of those things that I hear into as concise of a resource as possible for you. Because the wrong person to listen to when you're making your next tech decision is your software rep Da Doi. They're just trying to sell you more software. You can keep your muffin baskets, big boy. I got a better way to choose. Actually bring the muffin. Keep the muffin baskets coming. That is Food is just about the fastest way to any accountant sold. Okay, 18 payroll solutions. Let me actually just run through them, give you the whole list. Sure. Payroll QuickBooks, Payroll Premium QuickBooks, Payroll Elite Paychex, Flex Pro, Paychecks, Flex Oasis, MyPay Solutions Accounting CS, Payroll QuickBooks Payroll Core Patriot Payroll JustWorks Payroll ADP Run for Partners Rippling PEO. Rippling OnPay Just Works. PEO Gusto, ADP Refer and Earn. It's just a lot. As with all things in accounting firm software, it's a lot. If you didn't know certain software categories. Absolutely love accounting firms because we're very unique in that we can get bought on like a software platform and then sell it to hundreds of clients. Like there's very few types of businesses that work this way. And it's why software companies love to go after accounting firms. And goodness sakes, don't they go after you? Like the amount of inbound we get from software companies. It is, it's a lot. Also increasingly unscrupulous people. Some of these companies will literally like scrape lists of my followers and be like, hey, hey, did you say that? See that? Jason said this good thing about our software platform. And if you get emails like that. I'm sorry. And if you send emails like that. Stop it. Okay. We're talking about payroll software. Let me start out with the stinkers the stuff to just not even bother touching. Okay, first up, accounting CS payroll by your friend Thomson Reuters. This, I mean this is a payroll offering that surely is nearing end of life. Thompson, Reuters, they're shutting down, in process of shutting down file cabinet right now. Back the next one. I don't recommend my pay solutions. It's owned by Iris who's been acquiring all sorts of stuff. But Iris acquired MyPay from Thomson Reuters in 2022. MyPay is like a full done for you service. Basically you refer the work to MyPay and the client just interfaces with the product and the people from MyPay. So MyPay Solutions, I don't recommend that one because there's better solutions for just referring the whole thing out. Whereas the previous option accounting CS payroll from Thomson Reuters, it is a desktop payroll platform. It's from Thomson Reuters. Like there's just a hundred better ways to get the same thing done. Next one I'm not touching. Oasis by Paychex. Oasis is their mid market solution. It's a past acquisition that Paychex did and when I say mid market solution I mean it handles like multi entity handles benefits across all of that stuff. I actually had some big client groups that I use this with in practice and boy do I got stories. But I'll just tell you today Oasis, it's not the move. We've got much better solutions now than we had five years ago for like this same client situation. Next Paychecks Flex. This is Paychex is like full service online offering. That is they handle the deposits and the payments and the filings. Most of us have a pretty good collection of paychecks horror stories, right? I think the reason they're still around is the muffin baskets. It's something that others could take notes on. But paychecks for me they're like cloud payroll product. It's just sitting in a category with other solutions that are better and it's as simple as that. Next, Paychecks Flex Pro. It is a done for you service that you can refer clients to. This one I've heard Just anecdotally a lot of negative experiences about. And so I think there's, there's better done for you options. Three more to go here. Same for this one. Payroll Elite and Payroll Premium, they're just that what you pay isn't worth it. So QuickBooks Intuit, in general, they have been just on a massive killing spree, killing off all of their payroll products to send everyone to QuickBooks Online. So going forward, the only options you really have are three tiers, three flavors of QuickBooks Online Payroll, Core, Elite and Premium. Take a look for yourself. But the features at Elite and at Premium to me just are not worth it. I'm only going to use Core maybe. And so both Elite and Premium, they're both on my don't recommend list. They come with like HR stuff, things that are just much better and much less expensively found elsewhere if you even need them. I'm convinced these payroll offerings are really just for like small business owners that are rocking up directly to QuickBooks and just don't understand the ecosystem. But for you, you do, you're here, we're learning together. So I don't recommend touching either of those last share Payroll. Sure Payroll was a 2011 acquisition by Paychex five to seven years ago. Sure Payroll was pretty cool. In fact, there was a time, this was maybe six or seven years ago, where I was moving all of my payroll clients. And this was, I was well over a hundred payroll clients. We were moving all of them to a single payroll platform. We're like, we're going to do this in a better way. And that was, that was a project buddy. And it came down to either sure Payroll or Gusto. And, and this was very early days Gusto. Shortly after they'd rebranded from Zen Payroll. And you know what ended up being the difference maker is I got a slide deck from the people at sure Payroll that was like kind of right at the finish line where basically we'd gotten the best offers from both. And the last, the last slide deck we got from the team at sure Payroll that was kind of walking through the whole thing was so unbelievably littered with like typos and grammar that didn't make any sense and sentences that you couldn't even read that. I'm like, we've gone through this like three or four month process with them and it's coming down to the wire and like this, this is it. This is the level of like, I would be mortified if they ever put something in front of my client that looked like this isn't that wild that it just came down to that now since then, Gusto did one of these for. For the audio listeners, my hand is. Is shooting in an upward direction. Gusto has grown like crazy since then. Sure, Payroll. When's the last time you've heard about him? I mean, we talk a lot about acquisitions on this podcast and how I'm quite dour of any company that goes through an acquisition. Recent examples being Dext being acquired by Iris. We just talked about my Pay Solutions, a done for you payroll solution that was acquired by Iris. Heard anything about that last couple years? Probably not. Uh, safe send the most recent example, Thompson Reuters acquired that. Before that they acquired SurePrep and honestly we haven't seen anything interesting out of sure Prep since then. But sure Payroll acquired by Paychecks. Paychex. Not a super progressive company and like they bought it and it kind of is what it is. Compare sure Payroll, where like six or seven years ago I was on the fence. Like they were really neck and neck that platform versus the Gusto platform. Sure. Peril, like lets you do more like white labeling stuff. And so it actually had some things going for it. And since then you could have not had two more opposite trajectories where Gusto had not been acquired by anybody versus sure Payroll, which at the time was owned by Paychecks, which in some ways was like a stamp of legitimacy. Right? Like that was what my kind of legacy partners would have said. But the two trajectories since then have been. Just could not have been more different. Okay, so those are the ones to steer clear of those eight platforms. We're going to move up to the good enough category. And my good enough category, it has four platforms in it. And when I say good enough, what I mean is it's fine if you already got people on it. It may not be worth the squeeze to move them to something better, but it also might. My don't recommends are like actively. I actively recommend you take it to something else as soon as you can. My good enoughs are like, there's better options, but the juice won't always be worth the squeeze to take it somewhere else. Four options in this category. Number one, ADP run for partners. This is their like, kind of ADP's version of like Augusto, where you go in and you run the payroll and all that. Maybe it's fine if you're trying to keep everything in the ADP ecosystem. The reality is there's just other people that do this better than adp. Now, second option Just Works payroll. So Just Works started out as a peo company. We're going to actually talk quite a bit more about peos. But eventually they launched just a standalone payroll offering. But same thing here. It's not as polished as the experience that you get from the leaders in this category. And they don't support as many types of payroll either. So that one's for me it's a good enough where maybe if you're trying to do like if you got a bunch of folks on Just Works peo and you want to add a few that are payroll only. Sure, maybe that's an argument for keeping everything on just works. Otherwise there's better platforms for the same thing. Next in my good enough category, Patriot Payroll. Similarly, this is a. This. So this is a fully cloud based thing like Patriot. Like it's not terrible. But why I actually have them on this list because there's much better cloud based payroll systems is at payroll's basic tier you do your own filings and that's kind of gone out of style with the current crop of payroll tools. Right? All the kind of done for you automated filings. The reality is in certain situations some platforms will totally bungle that stuff and it's caused many accountants to try to reel that back in and be like I can't trust these platforms. Like that's a really hard long term bet to make that they're forever going to do that stuff wrong. I don't know that we want to get into the business of doing our own filings. But today if you want to, if that feels like the right answer for you. Patriot Payroll on their basic tier, it gives you a cloud payroll platform where you do your own quarterly filings. And that's actually very unique. I say quarterly. I'm pretty sure year end filings as well. You can DIY Today's episode is brought to you in part by Team up, who helps you directly hire talented accountants in the Philippines. But did you know that they can also help you hire an assistant? Did we. I feel like we just did an episode not that long ago we did about why you should have an assistant. Because if you want your team to learn the skill of delegation, buddy, all that learning starts at the top. And I know, I know I'm not the type of person that needs an assistant. Like it's like giving up gang. Here's the thing, you're gonna get stuff thrown at you every single day that is below you, that is beneath you. An assistant, they can help with that. And the assistant can even help facilitate like getting some of those things to the right members of your team. This is ultimately an opportunity for you to drop the low value stuff that you're doing to upskill other folks for whom those same tasks are actually an opportunity. Now if you want to hire an EA in the Philippines, I'll give you the salary range what this usually looks like one to three years experience working with US companies. They're usually going to come in between 1100 and 1200 dollars a month that is USD full time. Three to five years experience between 1200 and 1400 USD and five plus years between 1400 and 1600 USD buddy. They're out there and they're good and they make a difference. I got an assistant. I'm not ashamed to say it, and I think you should too. To learn more about team up help Check out the link down in the Show Notes Today's episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub, the practice management system that delivers WOW seasons year round. Not busy seasons. Seasons that will dazzle your clients for two reasons. One, Client Hub is drop dead simple man. If you're too tired of a practice management system that just feels like you got to have a PhD in learning something new, Client Hub you hop in, the vibes are great. It just all makes sense. But two, remember there's a second reason ClientHub offers a game changing client experience that is you can actually get clients to like collaborate with you and be helpful on the platform because the portal wasn't this like afterthought. Bolt on now. Very cool. Recent development in Client Hub Magic Books Review Twinkle sounds so ClientHub syncs in the transactions from your QuickBooks file. You can run an AI analysis on it like from inside of Client Hub. It'll highlight any potential issues you can mark like on the balance sheet P and L. You mark each account one by one, whether or not it's been reviewed. But if you want to troubleshoot, it'll pull you straight back into QuickBooks. Like you have to learn like a whole new troubleshooting tool. If you'd rather sort that stuff out in QuickBooks Other cool stuff it'll identify automatically expand expense inconsistencies, purchases without a payee, purchases in parent accounts. Why is why can we not disable that QuickBooks Large transactions, new accounts, new vendors, new customers. It's Magic Books review inside of ClientHub. I think you might like it. Learn more about Client Hub Check out the link down in the show notes. Our last one in this good enough category. QuickBooks Payroll Core and this is the lowest level QuickBooks Online Payroll offering. The two higher tiers I had in my don't recommends because they, they don't add that much or at least not enough to justify the added cost. Now you want to talk about horror stories. Boy, do we have many of them about QuickBooks online payroll, right? The thing is, we talk about this a lot with like practice management systems where wouldn't it be nice if all in one worked really, really well? The thing is, wouldn't it be really nice if my accounting ledger is here and my payroll could also be here as well? Like that's the biggest thing QuickBooks Online has working for it. But the payroll offering itself, like, it's just not as good and not as fully featured as many other built from scratch payroll and HR platforms that do that job really well. But the reason it's on the good enough rating here is just the benefit of having all that in one place. And the strongest argument for this is probably very small, very simple payroll situations where you've got, you know, just a couple employees and it's not a big deal. You're not doing any special gymnastics to get the reporting right though. Man, you hear a lot of stories about the reporting getting messed up in state and local stuff not being handled correctly. Your mileage may vary. I can tell you I did not run any payroll on QuickBooks Online. And the couple that we tried to do, it was messy, but this was three or four years ago. But man, you still in the wild, you see a lot of really scary things where it will like pull the wrong amount of money. And it's like, who do I talk about to even get this fixed? And you end up amending a bunch of quarterly reports. And that's just frustrating. Now payroll, payroll's hard. Like payroll is a thankless, loveless thing that's just exceptionally hard to do well. And like there will never be any payroll solution, at least not in the near term, that someone won't have horror stories about. And that's just worth acknowledging and being super clear about. Like, it's just really high stakes getting support on, you know, getting a notice from an agency, that sort of thing, getting any sort of support from the software company and somebody, someone on the other side that knows how to actually get to the bottom of that. It's really hard both because it's hard to build a software organization with people who can do that well, but then you layer on top of that, as we know, just how awful it is to work with the agency to resolve that. So we got kind of a double whammy of it's really hard for software companies to develop the skills and their people to do that well. But then when you add into that the fact that many agencies are difficult to work with, that just becomes an extremely frustrating experience. You've got bad agencies and then oftentimes bad support reps, like running interference and making it even worse. So like, there is no version of this that everyone will love and won't have problems, but there's still some that are better than the other other. Say other some are better than the other. So here's my top six that tick various different types of boxes. Number one is ADP is refer and earn. And anecdotally, I'd actually be very interested to hear your experiences. There is no version of referring your payroll business out and it going perfect, it going swimmingly. So like I, I've, I've never seen a version of this that is perfect. I can say I have heard the least problematic things about adp referring earn. And honestly, probably the hardest thing about this, these recommendations is what you end up hearing is, is one person's experience. And that's all they have where they'll be like, you see this probably the most with practice management systems where it's like, we use this one and we don't like it, so it sucks. And you're like, okay, have you used the other 10 or 15 though? Because there's a good chance that it might suck the least. And so the hard thing is kind of rolling everything I'm hearing up and sort of weighing those different things. And oftentimes it comes down to, to like volume. Where are people having the most issues? If you want to get out of payroll work entirely, I think right now you have two options. One, find a payroll practice where this is all they do. In fact, we've even talked with Matthew Patrick on this podcast before. He runs a payroll practice that partners with accounting firms. Go to someone like that and refer your work to them. Or if you want a more platform approach, I think ADP probably has the best platform for this right now from what I've heard. And so they are the only one in the top recommendation category that is a full done for you service where you send those clients over. There's usually some sort of revenue sharing, but you're off the hook. Your client goes directly to the reps there to interact and get stuff figured out. Okay, number two, gusto. Gusto. The number of years people called it gusto. It's called gusto Gusto honestly, they've had a rough two or three years. They had a pretty pristine image for a while, but they've had some struggles. That being said, it's still the closest thing to a complete solution for small businesses under 50 employees. And they're for years tried to push into the hundreds of employees, arrange and try to do that. Well, the reality is at like a hundred employees and beyond, you're getting into where you're probably not buying health insurance from the marketplace. Your benefit requirements get are getting a little bit more complex. You're doing your own group plans, and at that point you want something that can handle all that. This has always kind of been where gusto sort of bumped up against the limit of that, and they, they try to push through that and they try to prioritize bringing in bigger, bigger companies. But to date, I still don't think that's the move. But for small business payroll, I think gusto is still the best option that there is. But increasingly there's a hot take. I don't know if it's a hot take. This is my take. It's actually the way that I run my business now. I think peos, for all of their downsides, have become way more relevant because we've got a couple pretty good PEO platforms right now. And because of the nature of distributed work, like, you know what a pain it is for anyone who's like, oh yeah, we hire anyone anywhere. And you're like, oh, really? Do you. How much due diligence have you done into what it actually, what it's actually going to entail to employ someone in San Diego or that stupid little place in Ohio or whatever it is. That's a lot of freaking work. But you know what handles that really nicely? A peo. So peo is like the easiest way to step sidestep a lot of that headache. Not all of that headache, but having to like manage the payroll reporting for every single one of those little jurisdictions, that's a lot of freaking work across your entire client base ends up being a ton of back and forth with the agencies, and then they fire that client, that employee, after two weeks. Right now, the big trade off with peos is benefits can be limited and you don't have a ton of flexibility there. So if you're growing to 200 or 300 people where you want to do some more complicated customized benefit stuff, well, peos is kind of. You take what you can get, and if you're comparing it to the marketplace, like health insurance stuff that you get out There PEO is going to be totally fine. Like you're going to be able to get stuff that is just as good as that. But where people say PEO no longer becomes a fit is when they maybe want to get more advanced with the benefits that they do. And so today my business, I run it on a PEO and we've got employees all over the country and it's fine. Like it, it works fine. We really haven't had issues peos themselves, you can have issues for sure. But we also are, are very intimately aware of the issues of having a team that's all over the place and how much of a headache that is from a compliance standpoint. So. Guest no, it's not a PEO that's just straight up rolling payroll for your small business, but in the peo department just works. It's a very good option. It's one of my top recommendations. Not a perfect platform but it was the first like super modern end to end PEO that came with kind of all the bells and whistles that want. And if you're a first time PEO user you may get sticker shock because these are normally coming in between like 70 to $110 per employee per month. And if you're used to the pricing in a traditional just straight up payroll service, you're like holy cow, that's outrageous. You just gotta remember what all the PEO is handling for it's handling benefits, admin and like a platform like justworks does a bunch of other stuff too like, like time tracking. Like it's kind of your HR hub. And for me that is a ransom that I will happily pay to not have to fuss with all the compliance. The other PEO solution that's gotten good, it's rippling. Rippling. Both their payroll offering and their PEO offering are in my top recommendations. Rippling is going to be overkill for in my opinion. Rippling is going to be overkill in my opinion for small businesses with teams of 40 or less. Unless you're doing like multi entity, but multi entity with a small number of employees like that, you're kind of cruising for a bruising anyways. But for like 40 employee and less companies, I don't think it's worth looking at rippling. You go beyond that and with rippling you you lose some niceties and simplicities that like come with gusto but you add multi entity support for one but also a bunch of stuff around like IT management and a lot of things that actually go beyond payroll so they've got a payroll option and a PEO option, which is great. So if like you're pushing past 100 employees, you got people all over the place. That's probably what I'm looking at for a PEO solution. It's not super cheap and it's a big enough and complex enough platform to where like it takes a lot more work and learning than Gusto, which they've done a great job of simplifying. But beyond 50 people like Gusto, there's. There's probably better options to everything I'm saying here. I would actually love your experience with these things, good or bad. That goes a long ways. Last one I'm going to mention here in my top recommendations is onpay. Onpay has a pretty good cloud based payroll offering. I think it's maybe a step short of Gusto and Rippling. What onpay does handle is more types of payroll. So if you got to do like farm payroll, 9, 43s, H2A laborers, they will do some stuff that Gusto will not. So if you got a bunch of more complex or unique types of payroll that Gusto doesn't support, check out OnPay. They have a much wider level of support and what is still a very good payroll platform. Rippling Gusto and justworks for their payroll solution. Sorry, not justworks, Rippling Gusto and onpay. They all have a version of like built in benefit management. And this is for like, if you're buying health insurance on the marketplace, it can like integrate into the platform and employees can do like plan selection and all of that stuff inside of the same place where they go and they get their pay stubs. And it's magic when it works really well. Like it's really good. They've taken what is a really dumb and really manual payroll like health insurance process where you're filling out forms and you get your like explanation of benefits. And it's just like Jesus is a lot. They've taken all of that mess and put it into like an Amazon like shopping experience where you see all of your different plan options and it's clear as day, like so much more clear than an explanation of benefits, what the right option for you is. And so employees can go through that every year and like manage that stuff themselves, even come back. And if there's like a qualifying event, they can manage all that stuff inside the platform. And when it works, it's amazing. When it doesn't, it is a freaking nightmare. It is rough because similar to what we talked about with payroll resolution issues, you then have to worry about the person on the payroll software platform side who is purely, like, trying to reflect what the insurance company, the benefits provider is telling them. But now you've got, like, this weird triangular thing where it's like, do I go to the benefits provider like the insurance company, or do I go to the software company who is presenting this thing to my employee that may be incorrect or problematic. We had situations where it was like, you know, you have a person who's pregnant and like, in the middle of things and we can't get anybody to talk to us. As opposed to rolling your own benefits with, like, a local, like a local insurance company who's going to be. What do they call it? The agent of record. So it is. But then that person can, like, go to bat for you with the insurance company. To me, I had much more luck when there were problems working with an actual insurance company than through a platform where I got to get, like, a support rep and then they have to talk to the insurance company. And it's. It's a hard thing. We started steering a bunch of clients to it and then had some bad experiences and didn't really know what to do because the ceiling of how good it can be is so high. It's so, so good. But then when it goes sideways, it can also be really, really bad because nobody will be accountable and, like, track down a solution themselves. I'm still mixed on whether I would actually use, like, the benefit integrations in these platforms. I will say I've been out of the game for two years now. If you've tried it, like, specifically in the last couple years, I'd be interested to hear what your experience has been with integrated benefits. That's a lot of payroll stuff. Listen, more than I would like to talk about in a day. I'm gonna go get some mouthwash. You have any other experiences to share about these platforms or even any payroll platforms that we're missing? Drop that stuff down below. I think the bigger question in accountingdom is should we be selling payroll services still? Because it's very hard to make money on. If you want to explore that, we actually did an episode a couple, maybe three weeks back called like, should any accounting firms be selling payroll services still? But if you're looking at platforms, swipe my app database down in the show notes. It'll show you all the tools that we looked at here as well as a whole bunch of different app categories besides payroll. You can kind of rinse your brain out after that one to find some great tech for your firm. And thanks for being here.