Patriot Software vs. QuickBooks Online

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.

Incentivized

It seems Intuit is more interested in generating revenue than taking care of their customers. After only 28 (working) days using it, I've had to call for Help 23 times, and, in my experience, only spoken to 2 people who had an understanding of basic accounting practices and the ramifications of some of their suggested fixes on the General Ledger.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It enables me to do a P&L for each specific program as requested by the county for the grant money that they give us.
• It enables me to do [an] organizational budget as well as a budget for each specific program
• It enables the accountant and the auditor access at any time for transparency

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The budgets feature leaves a lot be desired - difficult and clunky to populate and maintain.
• Reporting for Budget vs Actual is available but the ability to reforecast based on updated data is not.
• The rules function to default common types of expenses isn't perfect and will get confused if like amounts or a number of similar items present.

Incentivized

It works well because it is cheap for us.

Incentivized

It like the product 'right out of the box' and I trust Intuit will continually improve it over the years based on my experience with their desktop products. The large providers of Apps makes customizing the entire package relatively easy and seamless for a wide variety of business types.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

While QuickBooks Online is generally easy to navigate, there are some features and functions that often require a Google search in order to find out where they are actually hidden. Additionally, there are some simple customization features that are surprisingly not available for an otherwise advanced program (e.g. only having a pool of 4 fonts to choose from, only having 4 very limited templates for invoicing, not color selection, etc). While I would say that about 75% of users shouldn't have a problem finding their way around with basic functions, there is a learning curve if you want to be able to dive into some of the more useful features, almost to the point that you need to have a dedicated account manager in order to use QuickBooks Online most effectively.

Incentivized

We have rarely had outages in the last 10 years. I can only recall 2 times in the last 10 years where we were not able to access our client files.

Incentivized

There are tab issues. When I tab the field doesn't highlight and I have to backspace or delete what is in the field. Happens on the memo field and sometimes other fields. Very time consuming.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Support is great, all incidents been resolved. Quickbooks Online forum is very well organized and helpful. I like the fact that they let the community contribute in resolving issues. Most or many of your answers can be found online. You can also get help on YouTube, but the easiest way to get assistance is through their chat system.

The person in charge of QB needs to be very accurate with record keeping and is recommended to stay on top of tasks. The biggest issue we have is reconciliation, and those issues occur only when too much time has occurred between reconciliations

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have used Wave Accounting for another business. I selected QuickBooks Online over Wave because of the features available from QuickBooks. Wave is great since it is free, but I feel that paying for QuickBooks Online is worth it for the features. In addition there is such a robust support network and training available for QuickBooks.

Incentivized

As we have grown along our professional path, we have also expanded our use of QB. The scalability is easy and features seem to be waiting for you until you need them. We have increased profits by over 10x from our first year in business to the current and have yet to find a reason to look elsewhere

Incentivized

• It boosts my time available for client-facing activities by not having to spend as much time processing payroll.
• It helps me deliver accurate reports to my CPA at tax time regarding employee wages and employer taxes.
• Through the online portal, I can easily track year-to-date taxes my company has paid.

Incentivized

• It has created a lot of cost and in-efficiency whenever we need to talk to support.
• I spent a lot of time setting up their automatic reminders for past due invoices and it worked for a couple of months and then it stopped. It's currently being worked on by their tech team but it has been months and it is still not working. It would have saved me a lot of time.
• Their multi-currency saves time in sending invoices abroad but it's limiting when a customer wants an invoice in USD instead of a foreign currency so I have to set up different customer accounts for different currencies.