Wade Armstrong

• Latest
• Archives
• Links
• About Me
• Projects
• Contact Me

Quickbooks: Best Payroll Processing for Small Businesses

Posted Thursday September 6, 2007 in Entrepreneurship

A few weeks ago, I switched my company over to Intuit’s Quickboks Payroll, replacing ADP as our processors. Only two payrolls later, I’m already in a groove with the quick and easy system. Why, if it didn’t involve large amounts of money moving out of my account, running payroll would be a joy!

I’ve used all the major payroll processing companies — ADP, Paychex, and Quickbooks — and Quickbooks is really by far the best. As the owner of a small business I value ease-of-processing and completeness and simplicity of integration with my accounting package. Whatever makes it easy for me to run payroll and understand how much money it costs me and where that money goes is the right service for me.

That doesn’t describe ADP. Running payroll is a multi-step Web process (sorry, Internet Explorer only). Unfortunately, the three key functions — running payroll, reporting, so you know what total liabilities with taxes are, and download into Quickbooks — are found on different Web sites that require different log-in info. Security is complex, with reporting using a single general log-in for the whole company, payroll using an individualized log-in, and Quickbooks download requiring installation of a security certificate on your computer. Bizarrely enough, this makes download into Quickbooks — which only puts a plain-text data file on your computer — more secure than actually running payroll.

The last time I used Paychex was four years ago. At the time, nobody offered payroll on the Web — you called in and talked to a service person who helped you run payroll. One of the major downsides of their service at the time was that they couldn’t tell you how much your employer taxes were until they ran payroll and debited your account. That makes it hard to plan payroll, especially when you’re paying equity partners in a company, who may be prepared to defer salaries if necessary. I have no idea if this is still an issue, although I suspect not. I would’ve considered them again, because their techs are so nice, but it took them 3 months for a salesperson to respond to my inquiry on their Web site, and by then I’d already gone elsewhere.

With Quickbooks payroll, everything works just as you expect it should. You enter your employees and pay rates, it figures taxes, debits the proper accounts, makes journal entries, and you can even print your own payroll checks - although, why would you, since they also offer Direct Deposit, without any waiting period? (ADP makes you wait 90 days before they do Direct Deposit.) That’s quick and convenient. The fees are reasonable, given how much time you save, even though they are slightly higher than ADP or Paychex. For a start-up where one busy person has to do payroll too, there’s no better choice than Quickbooks (I personally use the Assisted Payroll level).