Paychex Accounting Online vs. QuickBooks Online

I think Paychex Online payroll can be an asset for nearly any employer, especially if there have been improvements to allow employee access and data storage. Many employees prefer to be paperless and would rather access paystubs, W-2s, etc. online and/or via email. It'd also be great for employees to be able to make healthcare, 401k, etc., selections online and/or review selections made previously or in a different venue.

QuickBooks has long been a standard when it's come to small business accounting. Their tools work, the user interface is fairly intuitive to navigate, and it has suited the needs of our small business (11-20 employees) for the past 10 years. However, as we continue to grow and come into a greater need to control our branding, we find that QuickBooks Online often limits us in customization and branding. Plus, it just has some odds quirks in the coding of how the invoices are setup up that often requires us to "fight against the system" in order to accomplish what we want in our invoice structure.

• Process payroll
• Tax notices are addressed quickly
• Account manager is very responsive
• If payroll has an error we can pull back with no issues in a timely manner

• 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

• Can't assign invoices to categories like salesperson, division, or location, nor can your customers return a payment via credit card (there's no support for merchant accounts).

• 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.

Had the company I worked for not gone out of business, it is likely they would have continued using this service.

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.

The software was very user friendly. Menus were intuitive so that even with minimal training I found what I was looking for with minimal effort

Do NOT use their premium payroll. It's expensive and [I feel like] their customer service is horrible. I spent almost 4 hours trying to get an answer to a simple question about a 941 form they filed. They kept transferring me around to various people and every single time they couldn't find the 941 form I had a question on. I had to do a screenshare to show them where it was! I got disconnected three times and they never called back. They also told me that I would have to talk to the IRS at one point. I refused and told them that they were filing these forms on our behalf, they were doing the calculations so they should be able to answer my questions. I asked several times to talk to a supervisor and they wouldn't transfer me to one. They just said that they could put in a request for a supervisor to call me back in 24-48 hours! It was just unbelievable how horrible it was.

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.

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.

They deserve this rating. When I first began using Paychex at AIT they were there to answer all of my questions as needed because there was no one in the company who knew what they were doing. I had to do reports that Payroll normally did not do but I did. Thank goodness for Teshia and Martha at Paychex.

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.

Implementation was very smooth. The most cumbersome task was entering the current employees into the system during initial set up, but Paychex staff handled most of that and verified against prior system reports as well as internal reports provided to ensure 100% accuracy.

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

I haven't used any others, this is the only one I'm familiar with. It was already being used before I got here, so I didn't have much "deciding" to do.

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.

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

• The most positive impact Paychex has is their Customer Service. I LOVE Paychex Customer Service. Enough said.
• Paychex's IT Department is on point.

• Overall, QuickBooks Online is a great investment for the company of our size (small software startup).
• QuickBooks Online supports all the key functions of our company's accounting team.
• QuickBooks Online definitely made the life of our accounting team much easier which let us focus on more important issues outside of bookkeeping.