Red Wing Software headquartered in Minnesota offers a benefits administration and payroll solution, in their software CenterPoint Payroll.
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Patriot Software
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Patriot Software headquartered in Canton, Ohio offers Patriot PAY, their benefits administration and payroll software.
$17
per month
Pricing
CenterPoint Payroll
Patriot Software
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic Payroll
$17/mo + $4 per employee/contractor
Accounting Basic
$20/mo (unlimited use)
Accounting Premium
$30/mo (unlimited use)
Full Service Payroll
$37/mo + $4 per employee/contractor
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CenterPoint Payroll
Patriot Software
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Patriot Software has two payroll options to choose from: Basic Payroll, and Full Service payroll software. Both start with a simple three-step payroll process. With the Full Service Payroll, Patriot will collect, deposit, and file federal, state, and local payroll taxes on the customer's behalf; end-of-the-year payroll tax filing is included at no extra charge.
Print W2s on 8 x 1/2 x 11 plain white office paper to hand to employees, or post to the free employee portal. Also, Patriot Software offers free direct deposit.
CenterPoint Payroll has been excellent for our company, with approximately 150 employees. I can certainly see it being excellent for smaller companies and larger companies. I don't know if there is a size of company at which it would become difficult or limiting to use - I can't foresee any of the functions or features becoming limiting factors as company size increases. To a certain extent, I could see the robustness of CenterPoint being a bit more than what is necessary for a tiny company of less than 5 employees, but it would certainly be able to do what is required for them.
Patriot PAY is well-suited to a company that has a 10-day window between the end of the pay period and the payday. The company size makes very little difference and it is easy to use for any company. It is also very progressive in development and improvement. If a company has a small window for turn-around, but fairly consistent payroll amounts (such as a lot of salary workers), Patriot PAY might also be a good fit for them.
Companies with tight turn-around times or payrolls that vary significantly in direct deposit amounts might have difficulty using Patriot PAY.
It is simple, intuitive and straightforward in its design. Someone with little experience with roles in human resources roles, bookkeeping or payroll can quickly learn how to set-up the software and run payroll regularly by reading through the support portion of the site, or by contacting the helpful staff at Patriot. Patriot staff have walked me through issues or guided me on the phone as I learned how to use a function of the software.
Patriot provides comprehensive quarterly tax filing records, including 941s, state unemployment compensation tax payments, state employer's tax and local employer's tax filings. You can also generate payroll or tax deposit reports over a specific time period or per employee.
The support and FAQ pages available on Patriot are very practical and written in an easy to understand manner. Using the information provided there, I was able to properly set up new employees according to local and state filing requirements.
Connecting with outside software - we have an issue of Patriot not recognizing donors when connected to other websites when all the information is the same minus a middle initial
Giving an error page when something small is off. Instead of giving an easy to fix error notification, Patriot brings the user to an error page and they have to reenter everything.
Fixing dates easily. If a date is entered incorrectly, 8/13/21 instead of 2021, an error pop up appears but the user has to click enter/okay many times or refresh the page in order to fix this issue.
Enter vs Tab key - Patriot loves the tab key but if the user clicks enter instead, many times it brings them to the home page.
I think it is great once things are setup as for general user looking to look for simple things like a copy of a paystub or a current pay rate for an employee. However, to find specialized things like a state withholding number or payroll integration settings those do require a bit more digging to find or possibly a call to customer service for help.
CenterPoint support is excellent! While I have not had to use them frequently, as the program is consistently stable and has few, if any, bugs, the times I have had to reach out to tech support, they have been excellent and have solved our issues quickly. They listen to our explanation of the problems, can dial into our system to see exactly what we're seeing in real time, and have always been able to quickly determine the issue, work out a solution, and help us through the process until we've got everything back in line. They are friendly, courteous, professional, kind and very knowledgeable of their products. This is absolutely one of the best things about CenterPoint - even though we seldom need it, when we do, they are always quick to get us through the issue.
Generally speaking it is pretty good that when I need to call somebody up for a payroll question I can generally within five minutes get somebody on the phone and they can help me resolve the problem or specify where specifically I need to go or contact to find my answers. However, that being said, for my specific situation as a partner my assigned contact has not always been very responsive.
We selected CenterPoint Payroll because of our dissatisfaction with ADP (and Paychex prior). We wanted a solution that we controlled internally, instead of having to be at the mercy of some huge company that saw us as a tiny fish in a big ocean. We set our company's configuration, add/define all of our own specific settings, profiles, etc. and simply process payroll. We print and sign our own checks, process our own direct deposits directly with our bank, and can handle our own business needs. When we were with ADP and Paychex before, both companies made promises to us that they simply were either unwilling or unable to fulfill. We have saved both time and money by doing our payrolls ourselves with CenterPoint.
I briefly used Intuit Online Payroll, and it was expensive, had no support, and was very frustrating to use. I also used 3 local tax companies for payroll - they were extremely expensive and messed up all of the time. Their employee turnover was very annoying (and it seemed to happen every other month) and each employee did things differently. When I let one of my employees go, the last company paid them after termination (2 weeks of salary), and had to get into a legal battle because the employee would not give the money back.
CenterPoint Payroll has saved us tens of thousands of dollars from our prior arrangement with ADP, while providing either similar or superior support.
Having payroll completely in our control has simplified a LOT of our daily routines - if something needs to be updated or adjusted, we do it ourselves instead of contacting someone at ADP and hoping that they can do it for us, then getting frustrated when they haven't.
