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Patriot Software: Quick, user-friendly software to free up time for billable hours
August 09, 2018

Patriot Software: Quick, user-friendly software to free up time for billable hours

Shannon Bronico | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Patriot PAY

Patriot Payroll was used at my previous solo-attorney law firm for payroll, tax filing and tax deposits for employer taxes. I was the office manager before we merged with a larger firm. The office consisted of myself, the owner/attorney and a part-time law clerk. Patriot Payroll allowed me to easily process payroll for 2 employees and record tax filing and payments for end of year tax preparation and bookkeeping tasks. As I was also doing casework and other administrative tasks, it was helpful to have intuitive and comprehensive software to handle the payroll tasks.
  • 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.
  • I wanted to download all of the individual tax deposit reports in .pdf form at the end of the year. I had to download them one by one, which was very time consuming. I has hoped there was a way to perform a batch download of these reports. Patriot can export spreadsheet in .csv format, but the layout of the .pdf reports is much more user friendly for record keeping.
  • Using Patriot streamlined and simplified payroll and tax filing for our small office. This freed up my time to manage other administrative tasks and to complete more casework. The time I had to perform additional casework more than paid for the modest monthly charge for the service.
  • End of the year taxes were simplified, as Patriot took care of quarterly employer tax payments and filings and also generated quarterly reports.
I prefer Patriot to Paychex for several reasons. First of all, for a small business with less than 10 employees, the fees charged by Paychex are unnecessary overhead when Patriot offers high quality and more than sufficient tools to perform the same tasks. Paychex also does not offer the same option to add on services a la carte so that you only pay for the tools which you use regularly. When my employer used Paychex Flex, someone from the company would call each week to ask for the hours per employee to run payroll. I believe this is why they charge such a high fee as this is considered 'full-service payroll' since the user does not have to manually enter data. However, Patriot only requires logging in, entering each employees hours into a form and pressing 'OK' to run payroll each period. About fifteen minutes of easy and simple work saves a hundred or so dollars a month.
Patriot is well suited for an office with a small staff without complicated tax issues to manage. My office had 2 employees: one full-time and one part-time. There were no 1099's issued, and no special tax exemptions or other special tax situations for employees. The owner was a sole proprietor, so she was not paid as an employee through Patriot. It was easy to quickly run simple payroll tasks on a bi-weekly basis in my situation.

However, I believe a more complex situation with more employees would still be suitable for this software if there was an employee dedicated to performing payroll and human resources tasks. Information must be manually entered each payroll period and submitted before 8pm to process at the scheduled pay date, so if there was not a dedicated employee for the task, it would be easy to end up paying employees a business-day late.

I know that Patriot offers add-on services for human resource tasks, such as time sheets and tools to manage sick days, benefits, and record employee attendance. I did not require these extra services, but I like that Patriot offers services a la carte so that there is no need to pay for tools you do not need.