Intuit Online Payroll was a small business payroll option available as a standalone SaaS solution, that Intuit announced it was discontinuing in favor of Quickbooks Online Payroll, available via Quickbooks.
$22.50
per month
Netchex
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Netchex is a HR, payroll, and tax administration software platform with solutions dedicated to recruitment, hiring, and onboarding as well as payroll, tax compliance, HR, time/attendance, benefits management, and analytics for these areas.
I believe the ideal scenario is when you are already using the Intuit family of products and the payroll bolts on to your existing QuickBooks infrastructure. Payroll software products have been around a long time, and this is a very competitive niche. Most of the companies do a good job of filing taxes promptly, reporting W-2 items properly, providing good reports, etc. Where you might really get some extra efficiency and benefit is the fact that the payroll is woven into the accounting system, creating one seamless enterprise solution. Also, where it might be less appropriate is in a really simple use case such as a one person company where there aren't complex fringe benefits to deal with. In that scenario, you can set up the ACH debits directly with the state agency and the IRS and possibly file your own 941, 940, W-2/W-3 and state equivalent forms. Of course, if you're willing to do this and are good with details, you can save yourself some money.
Netchex is great if you want to log in to one place to take care of all things employee-related. It is especially helpful if you have multiple locations or divisions as you can easily set these up and manage them as needed. The more employees you have, the more you will benefit from a program like Netchex that provides so much support for your business. Our company has multiple locations of stores and many employee position levels and Netchex has been great at keeping all of this simple when a lessor product could make it much more complicated. Netchex would not be as appropriate if you have a very small business or a simple payroll structure. It would definitely still work well for you, it would just be more sophisticated than you would require.
Integration with QuickBooks Desktop. This is the key strength of IP... it is a complete, native integration and let's you maintain all employee records and time keeping in QuickBooks
Job Costing. Another key differentiation -- some payroll outsources say they do true job costing (by work or item code). Don't believe them. If its' not integrated with your accounting system, you will not get "TRUE" job costing. You can get costs ASSIGNED to jobs (which may be fine), but you won't get item level detail in QuickBooks from anyone but Intuit.
Variety of Payment options. Use Direct Deposit or manual checks... or whatever you want. Since its in QB, you can make payments any way you want.
Cash Flow. This is both good and bad, but IP will not take taxes out of your bank account until they are due. That's different than some other providers that want assurance that you have the tax payments available at the moment you push "SUBMIT."
My Netchex Service Team is very responsive and friendly. They are willing and able to spend the amount of time needed on one call to troubleshoot most problems or answer questions.
Their recent updates to the employee dashboard have been well-received by our seasonal team. Employees are able to quickly find what they are looking for which has minimized the amount of requests that my team receives regarding questions on pay or updating personal information.
Online W-2 forms have been a game-changer for us since moving to Netchex. Our staff tend to move around a lot and most do not get the mailed copy of their W-2. The electronic consent has saved me hours and hours of time.
My biggest issue is that they do continue to raise their prices on a regular basis and it makes people feel stuck when there are so many clients already using the system.
They do not support roaming employees, so employees that cross over into various tax jurisdictions in one pay period pose a challenge for calculating taxes and pay.
The setup can be a bit daunting still if you are not familiar with the system or the various taxes and requirements for reporting.
SOME CUST SVC REPS MAY NEED ADDITIONAL TRAINING ON WORK AROUNDS
WOULD PREFER TO CHAT WITH SOMEONE, SOMETIMES WORDS IN TEXT COULD BE MISINTERPRETED. ALSO SPEAKING TO SOMEONE IS ALWAYS A POSITIVE
NOT REALLY ANYTHING ELSE BUT HAVE BEEN USING THEM 3 MONTHS SO NOT LONG INTO IT.....VERY EASY SYSTEM AND LOVE I CAN DO A NEGATIVE INSTEAD OF HAVING TO CALL AND ASK THEM TO DO IT ON THEIR END.
I would rate it a 0. It gets worse and worse all the time. It seems like every time I go into IOP to run a payroll for one of my clients, I have one more problem.
The customer support personnel have always walked me through the steps they need to take to assist me. Never rushed through anything. Always exceptionally thorough, answering all my questions and even sharing my screen visually (I have control, not them). It actually helps me to resolve future issues and questions, if they should arise.
The first line CE team is phenomenal. They are helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable. We have had less luck with the responsiveness of the tax department. However, their response time has improved drastically over the past year.
It's a payroll software with decent customer support readily available and direct integration with my accounting tools. This made it a prime fit for me, and made payment and tax reporting relatively simple, and errors readily correctable. It does not have time tracking, and I still believe that this software is overpriced, but it's the best fit for me right now.
I like that they are not so big that they ignore the small customers. They are also reasonably priced. Their support is excellent, I had worked with ADP in a prior position, and we did not have the same kind of support
Positive: Less of a learning curve to train payroll accountants, as they are already familiar with using Intuit. Also, in general there are a larger pool of candidates who know this system than many of the other "niche" lesser known payroll products.
Positive: More options to choose from depending on the level of service needed. For example, there is a Full Service offering if needed. This might apply to an organization that doesn't have the resources available or an internal person who has the time/bandwidth to handle the entire company's payroll. Thus, it is possible to cherry pick the level of service needed depending on the type of company/situation.
Positive: Good audit trail. This can be extremely important and cost efficient when a business is going through an external audit by an outside CPA firm and the payroll accounting function is undergoing testing (ie. less time required by the external auditor would likely lower their bill for their services).
Associates can easily access their data and make changes to things like their address and direct deposit, saving manager time to focus on more critical tasks within the organization
NetRecruitier has one site that can be posted to multiple job boards with one applicant tracking system
Electronic Onboarding allows us to get information out to the new employee so we can start with expectations on their first day and they know what to expect.
