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Offloading payroll service
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18-May-2022 12:05pm

Among our bookkeeping clients we have about 10 of them that we also do payroll for. In CA we're now being faced with the CalSavers program among all the other hassles of payroll and compliance in CA and after EFTPS not alerting us that all the passwords expired and none of the recent payments went through, our office is feeling like we've had enough with the small amount of payroll that we do and the big commitment of it. We're thinking about options to offload the payroll service and I wanted to know what others have done / thoughts / experience.

We were thinking of ADP, Paychex, or maybe trying to use the full-service payroll with quickbooks since all the books are kept on QB. I'm not sure how well they all integrate (or not) with QB for bookkeeping and if others have had issues or ease with this. I'm not sure if it would really make things easier or if it would just add another level of complexity to things since I'm afraid less sophisticated clients might still need hand holding to get through everything anyway. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

18-May-2022 1:56pm

Perhaps look into "Patriot's" full service payroll for clients. We have had good experiences with it.

19-May-2022 6:51am

I offloaded my entire payroll service few years back because of the stress and BS involved dealing with very small employers that did not have adequate controls in their shop. I found a local shop that was interested in "cherry picking" clients so i let them do it. I believe that shop started at $3 per employee per pay period. They waived the setup fees. I think about 30% were not even considered so they got a termination of service letter a year in advance and they were asked to make their own arrangements.

My clients were small business generally 10 employees or less so ADP and the other national chains were not interested.

Unless your own shop is adequately staffed with the proper talent stay away from payroll!

26-May-2022 4:01pm

Whatever you do don’t use QuickBooks full service payroll. My experience with then was unreachable support, mistakes, late filed payroll returns and sometimes no filing at all!

27-May-2022 11:43am

CP Hay wrote:Whatever you do don’t use QuickBooks full service payroll. My experience with then was unreachable support, mistakes, late filed payroll returns and sometimes no filing at all!


Also, QuickBooks Desktop forced you to "upgrade" to their latest version every 3 years when you used their built-in payroll. QB Desktop now has moved to an annual subscription of around $350/year. We still use 2019 QB desktop for accounting without payroll. QB desktop cost $350 at that time. We can use it until new computers are needed and the software no longer works with the latest windows version.

14-Oct-2022 5:30pm

one of the best things I ever did for myself and my business was getting rid of payroll services.

was able to refer them all to 2 different, local mom and pop payroll providers that were more than happy to receive payroll clients

Even if I did have adequate staff to concentrate only on payroll services , I would not do it. I do not like the idea of dozens/hundreds of random non tax clients that depend on me to get paid, for any perceived "errors/mistakes", phone calls, problems, etc....

14-Oct-2022 5:58pm

For about $2400/year, our firm offers to do the "heavy lifting" when it comes to payroll processing, taxes, and deposits, but it does not include entering hours, running the actual payrolls, or communicating with the client's employees (it's in the engagement agreement that we will not do that).

We make an exception for s corp owner/employees payroll only, but in those cases we would prefer to have operation control over the payroll and withholdings in order to help the client with s corp compliance and tax planning.

Most of our payroll clients are s corp owners and perhaps they have a minimal amount of helpers. We avoid clients with more than 5 employees.

We clearly disclose to them that they can find a full service online payroll company to do the same for perhaps less cost, but most clients feel better having us as their advisors and there is much value in our experience and our supervision.

We use Patriot and provide a link to a user interface for the clients to run payroll, and then we oversee the filings and deposits.

We have about 50 clients in which we do this for which adds $120,000 to our gross revenue and it also helps the s corp clients that don't want to bother with an online service on their own. Our time costs are minimal and 90% of the data entry can be handled by lower-tier admin assistants.

15-Oct-2022 8:49am

I do not offer payroll unless I am provided at least $2500/yr in other work and I do work for their business.

I will never recommend ADP again. They are always late in filing state unemployment returns and payments and full of BS excuses. When proven wrong, they stop responding.

17-Oct-2022 5:46am

I had a full payroll service for about 50 companies. I sold it to ADP and it went very smoothly.
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