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QuickBooks 2013 Coming On September 24th

Chief Mechanic · September 12, 2012 ·

Intuit will release QuickBooks 2013 and Enterprise Solutions 13.0 on or about September 24th. Downloads from Intuit’s site will be available immediately upon release. Physical product should reach stores by sometime in October.

The biggest thing users will notice about QuickBooks 2013 is the new design, or graphical user interface (GUI) in tech-speak. The design incorporates colors from contemporary web sites and ribbons on forms similar to Microsoft’s popular Office software suite.

There’s little in the way of major new product features, but there are important tweaks throughout the program. We’ll cover the changes in more detail in future posts. For now we’ll touch on a few examples of the improvements.

In the QuickBooks 2013 Customer Center, shown below, information is organized into tabs. Customers can now have multiple contacts and multiple date-stamped notes, which can be managed on the Contacts and Notes tabs respectively. There are built-in links to maps and directions to the customer’s address to save having to re-enter that address in another application. When navigation and mapping apps are everywhere, it’s good to see Intuit recognize the importance of this type of information.

Many forms, such as the Create Invoices form shown below, now include a ribbon full of common commands. The ribbon is larger than the icons used in previous versions of QuickBooks. The increased size allows the text and icon to more clearly identify the task with which it is associated. In the past QuickBooks icons were so small that that they provided little useful information. In the age of retina displays, they simply didn’t cut it anymore, and QuickBooks 2013 is a recognition of that reality. Quick links have been added to a context-sensitive find tool. In other words, the FIND button on the Create Invoice ribbon has input fields for invoices, and the button on the Enter Bills ribbon has input fields for bills.

These improvements are useful, but no single one stands out as revolutionary.

The design change for QuickBooks 2013 is the standout feature. The new look won’t be universally loved, but the change brings QuickBooks much closer to the visual appearance of popular web sites, which are playing a growing role in setting the standards against which software is judged.

For more background on the changes in QuickBooks, check out Intuit’s blog post on the introduction of QuickBooks 2013.

(-1 rating, 1 votes)

QuickBooks Attached Documents

Chief Mechanic · January 18, 2011 ·

With the introduction of QuickBooks 2011, Intuit rolled out a new cloud-based document storage service: QuickBooks Attached Documents.

QuickBooks Attached Documents 100 MB Limit Warning

QuickBooks Attached Documents allows a QuickBooks user to attach an unlimited number of documents to a transaction or list item and store the attachments on Intuit’s secure servers. It replaces the Document Management service introduced with QuickBooks 2010. QuickBooks Attached Documents costs $19.95 per month for each company file that will make use of the service.

Before we delve into the details, here are some important points about the service. It supports:

an unlimited number of attachments per transaction and list item but each attachment must be under 100 Mb in size;
attaching documents to most – but not all – QuickBooks list items;
1 company file per subscription;
local storage for QuickBooks 2011 users – but even exclusive use of local storage requires a paid subscription;
a Document Inbox of unattached documents – an important tool for simplifying workflow;
attaching most common file types, including PDF and Microsoft Office formats;
linking an attachment to a QuickBooks list item or transaction from within QuickBooks only;
searching for a document by file name, title, description and keyword, user who attached the document, and the QuickBooks record to which the attachment is linked;
filtering documents based on any 1 list item or transaction type plus a date selected as 1 of 4 pre-set options or a custom range but multiple list/transaction filters cannot be selected, such as filtering for all bills (a transaction type) for a specific vendor (a list item);
drag-and-drop uploading of attachments through QuickBooks but not a web browser;
sharing 1 document at a time via email with 1 or more individuals who are not subscribers; and
web browsers that include support for Adobe Flash.

It’s also important to understand what Attached Documents does not do. The service can’t:

attach the same document to more than 1 list item or transaction;
add multiple documents at a time via the web interface; or
store documents in a traditional folder structure.

There are 2 distinct ways of looking at the functionality of QuickBooks Attached Documents: from a web interface or from within QuickBooks.

Using Attached Documents With A Web Browser

Let’s start by taking a look at the service from a web browser after you’ve signed up for the service. The first step is to sign in at Intuit’s Workplace secure sign in page. In the screenshot below, note the lock symbol indicating the site is secure from the start.

QuickBooks Attached Documents Secure Sign In

Depending on the other Intuit services you’ve purchased, you may start out at the Intuit Workplace, which shows icons for the applications assigned to your account plus teasers to entice you to buy more apps. For our purposes, we’ll click the icon for QuickBooks Attached Documents and jump in.

If you’ve just signed up for the service, your QuickBooks company file is not linked to QuickBooks Attached Documents. That’s a step you have to complete from within QuickBooks, which we’ll cover later in this article. For now, let’s close this welcome screen since we’ll tackle the linking issue once we launch QuickBooks.

QuickBooks Attached Documents Link Notice

Here’s the Online Document Center, the main screen of QuickBooks Attached Documents in a web browser:

QuickBooks Attached Documents Online Document Center

Basics of Adding a Document

Uploading new documents is a critical step for any document management program. Adding a new document to QuickBooks Attached Documents is a straightforward process.

Once you click the Add Document To Inbox link in the upper left corner of the Online Document Center, you’ll be greeted with the Document Record window, shown below.

QuickBooks Attached Documents Document Record

Using your operating system’s file browser, you can locate a document on your local disk system and record the title, description, and a comma-separated list of keywords. There are a few important limitations of adding a document via a web browser: you can only add 1 document at a time and the web interface does not support drag-and-drop. Both of these features are available when working from inside QuickBooks itself.

When you add a new document, it starts its online life in the Document Inbox. The Document Inbox is a handy workflow tool because it represents the documents that haven’t been attached to a list item or transaction in QuickBooks. You can think of it as your “to do list” for attaching. When viewing the Document Inbox, there’s a checkbox marked Include Previously Attached, and you’ll want to make sure this checkbox is not checked so that documents linked in QuickBooks don’t show up in the inbox.

The Actions Button

QuickBooks Attached Documents supports 3 basic actions, Download, Share…, and Edit. You’ll find all of these tasks on the Actions button, shown in the screenshot below.

Download allows you to save a copy of the document locally. Share… allows you to send an email link to provide viewing access to the document with users who don’t have access to your Attached Documents subscription. The Edit menu selection gives you access to change the information in the Document Record window, recorded when you first added the document.

Finding a Document

QuickBooks Attached Documents Date Filter

By far, one of the biggest questions that comes up in considering the value of a service such as QuickBooks Attached Documents is the ease with which you can locate a document you’ve uploaded.

Attached Documents has 2 basic methods: you can search for a document or you can filter the list of displayed documents. If your filter reduces the list of displayed documents down to a small number, you can pick the document out from the list of those displayed or you can search the filtered list.

Documents are searchable based on 6 criteria:

file name
title
description
keyword
the user who initially uploaded the document
the QuickBooks record to which the attachment is linked

Search results are based on the current filter applied to the documents listed, and you can narrow that filter to get better search results.

QuickBooks Attached Documents Customize Filters

You can filter by date using one of 4 preset date ranges or a custom date range.

You can also filter by any 1 list item or transaction, combined with a date filter. By default, QuickBooks Attached Documents displays a limited set of list item and transaction filters, but you can customize that list by clicking the Customize Filters link at the lower left of the Online Document Center.

QuickBooks Attached Documents gives you the ability to filter by most – but not all – list items and transactions. You can’t filter or attach documents to: price levels, billing rate levels, classes, and customer/vendor profile list items (such as terms or sales reps). While that might seem to exclude a lot of possible attachments, the likelihood that you’ll want to attach a document to one of these list items is small. A simple workaround is to create a “placeholder” record in an existing list that can accept attachments, such as the Other Names list.

You can attach a document to most transaction types. A good rule of thumb is that if the transaction is recorded and can be viewed on a QuickBooks form, such as a vendor bill or customer invoice, you can attach a document to the transaction. For transactions not recorded or viewable on a form (such as a statement charge, which is viewable on a register), you can’t attach a document.

One important limitation of filters in QuickBooks Attached Documents is that you can only filter on a single list item or transaction type. That means you cannot filter on bills for a vendor, for example. To achieve a similar result, you’ll have to combine a filter with a search.

Adding Users

QuickBooks Attached Documents allows you to add an unlimited number of users to your subscription and manage their access to documents. You can provide access in 1 of 4 pre-defined roles: Administrator, Full Access, View Only, or Custom Access. Only users with Administrator privileges can manage users, and only users with Administrator or Full Access privileges can delete documents. Custom Access allows you to control the ability to add a document to any area and to view and modify documents in 8 pre-defined areas:

Sales and Accounts Receivable
Purchases and Accounts Payable
Checking and Credit Cards
Time Tracking
Payroll and Employees
Inventory
Sensitive Accounting Activities
Company Documents

If a user is assigned the Custom Access privilege to add documents, the user can add any document; control over adding documents is not granular to the same degree as viewing or modifying them.

Document Sharing

QuickBooks Attached Documents allows you to share a link to a document with another party via email without adding that person as a user on your Attached Documents subscription.

QuickBooks Attached Documents Invitation

One limitation of the service is that you can only share a link to a single document at a time, so if you need to share several documents, count on your colleagues receiving multiple emails.

The first time you share a document, you’ll see this summary of how sharing works, and you can turn it off for future sharing by clicking the Don’t show this message again checkbox at the bottom of the form.

QuickBooks Attached Documents Share Document

When you’re ready to share a document, choose the Share… link on the Actions menu for the document you want to share. You’ll be able to customize an email to your intended recipients.

QuickBooks Attached Documents Send Invitation

Here’s the email your sharing recipients will receive:

QuickBooks Attached Documents Sharing Email

Using Attached Documents Inside QuickBooks

Many users will opt to use Attached Documents almost exclusively from within QuickBooks. Those that do will find features not available when accessing the service via a web browser.

Establishing the Connection To QuickBooks

As we covered near the top of the article, once you launch QuickBooks, the first step to using QuickBooks Attached Documents is to connect your company file with your service subscription. To do so, visit the Company -> Attached Documents -> Learn About Attached Documents menu selection, sign in to your Attached Documents subscription, and QuickBooks will perform the connection.

There are a few important restrictions on connecting to QuickBooks. First, document attachment services first became available with QuickBooks 2010, so if you’re using an older version of QuickBooks, you need to upgrade your QuickBooks version. Second, in QuickBooks 2010, the service of this type had a different name, Document Management, so your menu choice will refer to that service. If you previously used the Document Management service, you’ll have to remove that service from your company file before you can use Attached Documents, and that’s a process that will require sending your company file to Intuit. Lastly, while you can use Attached Documents with QuickBooks 2010, you can’t use the ability to store documents locally unless you have QuickBooks 2011.

Once you’re connected, here’s the Attached Documents menu structure in QuickBooks 2011:

QuickBooks 2011 Menus for QuickBooks Attached Documents

Add To Online Document Inbox

We’ve already covered adding documents via a web browser and the role of the Document Inbox, so we’ll just focus on what’s new when accessing the Document Inbox from inside QuickBooks. To start, visit the Company -> Attached Documents -> Add to Online Document Inbox menu selection.

From within QuickBooks, click the Local Files button at the top of the window to add new documents. Adding documents from within QuickBooks gives you several important capabilities: adding multiple documents at a time and adding documents by drag-and-drop. Those improvements are offset by a small change in workflow: you’re not automatically capturing the Document Record information on upload. You’ll have to edit the Document Record from the Actions button in a web browser for each document you upload using this method.

If you’re working within QuickBooks, you can also choose to add a document to your Online Document Inbox directly from your scanner. QuickBooks supports several profiles for Twain-compatible scanners:

Attaching Documents

You can only attach a document to a list item or transaction from within QuickBooks with your company file open. For list items, the specific method to attach a document varies by list item, but the general approach is the same:

use the Attach button at the bottom of the list display;
invoke the context menu (by right clicking) on a list item in a center, such as Customer Center; or
double-click in the Attach column on the list item.

Any of those methods will open a window where you can choose from an existing document already added to the Online Document Inbox or a new document on a local disk.

A QuickBooks list item or transaction with an attached document is marked in one of several ways. For list items, a paper clip appears in the Attach column for any list item with at least 1 attachment. For transactions, you’ll have to open a form for the transaction and observe the color of the paper clip at the top of the form window. As the Enter Bills window below illustrates, when the paper clip is green, the transaction has an attachment; when it’s gray, it doesn’t.

QuickBooks 2011 Vendor Bill With Document Attached

Intuit could make existing attachments more obvious in centers, such as the Vendor Center, by adding an Attach column to the list of transactions. So far, as of R5 for QuickBooks 2011, it’s not there, so you’re stuck having to open a form to learn if an attachment has been made.

Conclusions

Now that we’ve covered all of the ins and outs of QuickBooks Attached Documents, is it worth it? For now, we’ll give it a qualified thumbs up. The prior incarnation of this type of service, Document Management for QuickBooks 2010, lacked the ability to store unlimited documents. That made it difficult for those organizations who would most benefit from a service of this kind to even consider it. Attached Documents overcomes that limitation and comes in at a price point that is virtually unbeatable.

The price advantage that Attached Documents has over most big name competitors jumps out once you adjust for the number of users accessing the service or consider caps on storage. Intuit is offering an unlimited number of users an unlimited amount of storage for $19.95 per month. By comparison, cloud-based storage competitor Box.net offers 500 Gb total storage for $15 per user per month. For most companies, that’s a lot of storage, but at just 2 users, Box.net works out to be 50% more expensive than QuickBooks Attached Documents. The more users you need, the bigger the price advantage for QuickBooks Attached Documents. Dropbox, another popular cloud storage service, charges $19.95 per month for 100 Gb of storage. The cost of these services includes primarily cloud-based storage and doesn’t include the biggest feature of QuickBooks Attached Documents – the ability to link documents to accounting records. The productivity gains from not having to maintain an index that connects documents to accounting information are huge. And that’s a differentiating feature that generic storage systems can’t offer.

Beyond generic cloud-based storage solutions, QuickBooks Attached Documents does have competition in the market for linking documents to accounting records. SmartVault offers plans that range from $19 to $69 per month, but those plans include caps on storage, the number of users, and in some cases, the number of guests for document sharing. The company’s $69 per month plan caps disk storage at 30 Gb for 5 users. That’s 3 1/2 times the price of Intuit’s service that doesn’t carry those same limits.

Papersave Plus skips the cloud altogether and sells a software product based on a per user license that stores documents locally. Prices range from $199 for a 1 user license to $699 for 5 users. A local-storage only approach does save recurring monthly subscription fees for a much higher initial investment but gives up the disaster recovery benefits of off-site storage, a big advantage of cloud-based systems. We’d rather make our document management do double-duty and provide both accounting record-keeping and disaster recovery.

With the big pricing advantage and strong QuickBooks integration, what qualifications are we attaching to our thumbs up assessment? QuickBooks Attached Documents is a big improvement over its earlier offering, but it lacks a few features found in other document management systems, and these features are often behind big productivity gains. Here’s our wishlist for improvements to Attached Documents. Intuit needs to add:

the ability to have an auto-syncing folder on a local disk, where documents in the folder are automatically added to the Document Inbox;
the ability to drag-and-drop new files, including more than a single file, into the Document Inbox using the web interface;
the ability to print a file or a Microsoft Office email message to the Document Inbox directly;
the ability to search within the contents of files in addition to the meta-descriptions of files; and
the ability to set multiple filters for cases where a filter plus search are less effective.

Most of these improvements are features that exist in the document management world. It’s simply a matter of Intuit devoting the resources to add them to QuickBooks Attached Documents to make a good product a great one.

(+1 rating, 3 votes)

What Does the New Collections Center In QuickBooks 2011 Do?

Chief Mechanic · September 18, 2010 ·

QuickBooks 2011 and Enterprise Solutions 11.0 include a new Collections Center that enables you to quickly and selectively send bulk emails to customers with overdue or almost due invoices.

To access the Collections Center, start by opening the Customer Center, then click on the Collections Center link at the top of the window.

The Collections Center has 2 tabs: one showing Overdue invoices, and the other showing Almost Due invoices. You can selectively send emails to customers with invoices appearing on either list, and the techniques for doing so are the same. We’ll focus on sending emails to customers with overdue invoices.

Invoices are grouped by Customer Name, and you can sort the list by either Customer Name, the total customer Balance, or the Days Overdue. To sort by a particular column, simply click on the column header.

The Contact column contains the customer’s phone number, so the Collections Center could serve as a great tool for a call list. You can document a phone conversation with the customer or any other internal information (such as the reasoning for a decision not to call or send an email) by clicking on the icon in the Notes/Warnings column. This will bring up an editor that is positioned at the top of the note and has already added a date/time stamp. Previously recorded notes are saved and appear below.

QuickBooks 2011 Collections Center Notes

When you’re ready to select which customers (and for which invoices) should be sent emails, click the Select and Send Email link at the top of the Collections Center. If you want to return to reviewing the list, click the Back button.

QuickBooks 2011 Collections Center Send Mass Email

You can select which customers will receive emails by clicking the checkbox to the left of the invoice number. By default, all overdue invoices for all customers on the Overdue tab are selected, but you can easily deselect one or more invoices from any customer. If you remove the checkbox on all invoices for a given customer, that customer won’t receive an email. Selected invoices are attached as PDF files to your email and are sent using your selection of email client. To make sending forms easier, QuickBooks 2011 includes updated options for sending forms.

In the email form to the right of the list, you can change the default email message. Only 1 message will be sent to all customers currently selected, so be sure to craft a generic message that applies to all of your selections. If you want to send different email messages to different customer groups, you’ll have to select each customer group and complete the sending process before selecting another customer group.

When you’re satisfied with both your selections and email message, click the Send button. QuickBooks will notify you that the process is complete, but you can choose to block this message after the first appearance.

To manage the default messages for overdue and almost due invoices, QuickBooks 2011 has added 2 new message options. You can manage the default message for any form, including these 2 new options, by clicking on the Company Preferences tab of the Send Forms sub-menu on the Edit->Preferences menu selection.

The Collections Center is a valuable addition for businesses that want a unified tool to review customer invoices, document any discussions with customers or internal decisions, and easily send selected invoices to customers in bulk.

(+1 rating, 3 votes)

Using the Clean Up Company Data Utility

Chief Mechanic · April 10, 2010 ·

The notion of “spring cleaning” has been around for a long time. In the business accounting world generally and among QuickBooks users specifically, there are several forces that combine to make this a common time of the year for clean up. Financial and tax reporting requirements cause business owners and accountants to take a closer look at their accounting systems after closing the books on the just completed year. For QuickBooks users, Intuit’s service discontinuation policy also comes into play. For QuickBooks 2007 users, the lights on Intuit’s online services will go dark on May 31, 2010, forcing users that need these services to upgrade.

QuickBooks includes a powerful utility to help with the clean up process: the Clean Up Company Data utility. Running this utility is a great way to grab some important benefits:

improve QuickBooks performance by reducing the size of the company file
improve efficiency by reducing the number of list entries QuickBooks users have to scroll through
reduce the chance of assigning a transaction to the wrong list item

Company file size has a big impact on performance in QuickBooks. If you’re running QuickBooks Pro or Premier and your company file is much bigger than 100 Mb, it’s time you investigated the Clean Up Company Data utility. If your QuickBooks lists are filled with stale entries, you’re wasting time on every transaction reaching the right list entry and increasing the risk you choose the wrong one. The time waste and risk is small on each individual transaction, but multiply that over thousands of transactions per year. The costs and the risk of even a few erroneous transactions can become material.

To help get you started on running the Clean Up Company Data utility, we’ve posted 2 new articles in our KnowledgeBase.

The first article is an overview of what the Clean Up Company Data utility does, and the second covers the effects of running the Clean Up Company Data utility.

It’s never to late to get a jump on your spring cleaning.

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How Do 3 Big Payroll Services Compare?

Chief Mechanic · November 11, 2008 ·

UPDATE: Time never stands still, and that aphorism certainly applies in the payroll service world. This article has become one of our most popular, so with all of the changes in payroll services for QuickBooks customers, it was overdue for a refresh. At long last, here it is.

Best Choice for Payroll Processing for 1 Company:

Best Choice for Payroll Processing for Up To 3 Companies

As every business owner knows, it takes a lot of work to turn timesheets into a completed payroll either in the form of paychecks or direct deposits, calculate all deductions, and process all payroll taxes. That’s where payroll software and services prove their value on a regular basis.

In response to a request, we undertook a comparison of 3 big payroll services: Intuit, ADP, and Paychex. We did our initial comparison in late 2008, and we freshened that analysis at the start of 2011.

Since our initial analysis, there were some big changes in the payroll processing world. In 2009, Intuit acquired PayCycle for about $170 million. PayCycle was one of the largest players in the online payroll processing market, and the acquisition added significantly to its share of this market. The big impact: Intuit’s focus on online payroll products has increased.

Since we conducted our initial analysis more than 2 years ago, the cost of Intuit’s online payroll offerings has either dropped by 24% or gone up by 4%, depending on the product you choose, and there are more online products from which to choose. In the same time period, the effective cost of its desktop payroll products has jumped by 32%. It’s easy to see that Intuit is encouraging users to process payroll online by making the online service offerings more capable and widening the price gap to similar desktop products.

Let’s see how the 3 payroll service providers stack up in 2011.

First, the basics. Our objective was to find the right software or service to prepare payroll and file/pay all payroll taxes for a firm with a payroll of 10 employees paid weekly in a specific northern Virginia zip code. Payroll costs should easily integrate with the QuickBooks GL. Once implemented, the firm will be switching from the current manual payroll system.

We started with online quote systems and supplemented what we learned with phone calls and emails to pin down the details.

In payroll processing, as you’ll soon see, the devil is in the details. We compared:

If you need to distribute physical checks to employees, there are some fundamental differences between Intuit’s service offerings and the competitors we evaluated. For all of the Intuit services, an organization must print any physical checks it needs to distribute. For all but 1 service plan (Assisted Payroll) it also needs to print any forms that will be distributed to employees, such as W2’s. For ADP & Paychex, delivery of physical checks and forms is either included or available as an extra-cost service. Printing checks and forms is a routine task that QuickBooks users perform regularly. Therefore, if the savings are significant, the small amount of extra work to print any required payroll checks isn’t a big hurdle to adopt Intuit’s services.

Intuit Online Payroll provides the “anytime, anywhere” advantage of Software as a Service (SaaS), allowing you to manage payroll from any web-accessible PC. It covers up to 100 employees (a practical limit). Depending on the version of Online Payroll you choose, it includes the tax payment and filing capability of its more expensive relative, QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll. Of course, it integrates with QuickBooks.

Intuit Online Payroll comes in 2 flavors: Basic and Plus with monthly costs of $25 and $39 respectively.1 Quoted monthly costs don’t tell the whole story. The standard monthly fee includes service for 1 employee, and every additional employee costs $1.50 per month. For a 10 employee company, that takes the monthly costs up to $38.50 for Basic and $52.50 for Enhanced. Offsetting that jump in monthly cost is the fact that Intuit Online Payroll does not charge extra for direct deposit fees. Another consideration is that Online Basic doesn’t support paying 1099 contractors, but Online Plus does.2 Online Basic doesn’t complete state tax forms – an important task in payroll processing. One other wrinkle: Intuit Online Payroll Plus provides state tax processing for 1 state at its standard monthly rate; every additional state is an extra $12 per month. Although we include it in our comparison table, we can’t consider Online Basic as a viable contender in our comparison.

QuickBooks Basic Payroll is targeted at firms that need to process payroll and want up-to-date tax tables for payroll calculations but will prepare, file, and pay payroll taxes either on their own or with the assistance of their outside accountant. Despite the “Basic” in its name, this is a desktop product and is separate from Online Basic. QuickBooks Basic Payroll is a good value for firms with up to 3 employees, and for an extra cost it can handle an unlimited number of employees. Payroll can be completed by printing a check or making a direct-deposit, but direct deposits carry an extra fee of $1.25 per deposit. When combined with your payroll frequency, this direct deposit fee has a big impact on the smart choice for payroll processing. If you pay frequently, it tips the scales to a service like Online Payroll Plus that doesn’t carry a direct deposit fee. Like Online Basic’s lack of state payroll tax processing, QuickBooks Basic Payroll doesn’t meet one of our requirements – filing and paying payroll taxes. Therefore, the desktop Basic Payroll is just included for completeness.

QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll is designed for firms that want to process payroll and prepare, file, and pay payroll taxes. Enhanced, just like Basic, can make payroll with either a paycheck or a direct-deposit, and direct-deposits carry the same extra charge of $1.25 per deposit made. With Enhanced Payroll, a company can file payroll taxes at no cost with E-File and pay those taxes with E-Pay. At year-end, Enhanced Payroll provides the links for a firm to print W2’s on its own hardware and forms.

QuickBooks Assisted Payroll extends the service of Enhanced Payroll3 to include Intuit preparing, filing, and paying payroll taxes. It also has an extra cost option to supply complete W2 forms at year-end. Of course, strong integration with the QuickBooks GL is standard.

One of the important differentiators for Intuit payroll service offerings is the number of different employer identification numbers supported. An employer identification number (EIN), or tax identification number, is a unique number issued to a business. If you need to process payroll for several businesses, don’t overlook the number of EIN’s supported, because this detail can completely change the outcome of this comparison. QuickBooks Assisted Payroll and Intuit Online Payroll, including Basic and Plus, are designed to process payroll for a single EIN. If you have 3 companies that need payroll processing, plan on buying 3 subscriptions. QuickBooks desktop-based Basic and Enhanced handle up to 3 EIN’s.

All of the Intuit payroll offerings feature direct deposit. Many employers are finding that some employees want to be paid by funding a debit card. That’s a common need for employees that don’t have easy access to a bank or don’t feel comfortable using online banking features. Intuit has addressed this need with its own Intuit-branded debit card called the Intuit PayCard, and any direct deposit payroll payment can make use of this capability.

For small businesses, ADP has 3 packages: Compliance, Compliance with Pay Convenience, and Compliance with Pay Convenience and Reporting. Note: The links open images of the actual ADP quotes. Compliance is similar to QuickBooks Basic Payroll except that ADP will supply printed paychecks or make direct deposits; payroll taxes are calculated, but not filed or paid. Compliance with Pay Convenience and Reporting is the most expensive of the 3, and the extra cost is for additional reporting which could be useful in certain environments (e.g., a unionized workplace). ADP’s standard reporting covers most needs. Therefore, we’ll focus on ADP’s Compliance with Pay Convenience, which includes making payroll by paycheck or direct deposit4 and paying/filing all payroll taxes. It also includes a QuickBooks GL interface at no cost if a company’s accountant is a contact for the service.

For Paychex, we evaluated two options: its Flexible pay package and Small Biz paperless option. Flexible was the option quoted on the web, but the quote omitted the cost of a number of services to meet our requirements. Small Biz is a new paperless option quoted by the local Paychex rep that offers a cost significantly lower than other Paychex programs, but it lacks a true QuickBooks GL interface and is only a good choice if all employee payments are made by direct deposit.

In fairness to both ADP and Paychex, we didn’t spend a lot of time updating their pricing, but their approach to marketing their services is to blame. For all of the Intuit offerings, any visitor to the company’s website can see a plainly visible price. To be sure, that price needs to be adjusted for details often buried in footnotes. In contrast, a visitor to the sites of ADP and Paychex won’t find pricing in plain sight. Pricing is only available with a phone call or a contact form submission. Business owners quickly learn a rule of web marketing: if a company doesn’t openly publish prices, its prices aren’t the lowest. Intuit deserves a lot of credit for its relative price openness. There’s still room for improvement, but Intuit is well ahead of ADP and Paychex when it comes to pricing transparency.

Now for our comparisons. First, a word about gathering the data. Our first stop was the website for each service, and in our first pass we followed up with phone calls and emails to company reps. As noted above, for our latest update, we checked in with Intuit but didn’t have time to pursue updated quotes from ADP and Paychex.

Every service had some extra charges that required digging to unearth. But the significance of these extra charges varied widely. While ADP was the most expensive, in our initial comparison it got high marks for responsiveness and directness. Within a day of requesting our quote, we had a follow-up email from an ADP manager. That in turn prompted more questions from us, and in just a few hours, those questions were fully and directly answered.

If ADP was responsive and direct, Paychex was a little harder to work with in our first go-round. Its national sales center wouldn’t give out pricing information, leaving that to a local rep. The local rep provided fast, thorough answers and came up with a recommendation for a different service offering that was 63% below the program quoted online. But if a business is going to have an online quote system and a national sales center, why not let those systems quickly present the company’s best price? More importantly, the cost for the service quoted online was $2028, but the bottom line cost for what we were trying to price was $3889.50, or 92% higher. That’s a lot of extra-cost add-ons that should have been easy to include in the online quote.

Intuit’s payroll team was quickly reachable by phone and provided some of the extra charges that aren’t included or easily located on its website. For Enhanced Payroll, all costs are shown on Intuit’s website. However, Intuit’s Assisted Payroll had 1 add-on cost (i. e., the cost for W2’s) that required a phone call to identify. That item bumped the price by about 5%, far less than the 92% jump for Paychex. Assisted Payroll recently experienced a major price increase that wasn’t included on Intuit’s website as of the date it went into effect, but it did make it online by the time we finished this post. For the Intuit offerings, we applied our ProAdvisor/Affiliate discounts, which you can take advantage of by following the links at the top of this page or on our Buy QuickBooks page. For Enhanced Payroll, the savings is about $112.

QBGarage.com Updated Payroll Comparison 2011

You can click on the above image for a larger view or download our updated 2011 Payroll Comparison. 5

Conclusion

So where does that leave us? If yours is a single business processing weekly payroll in 1 state that uses direct deposit for all of its employees, Intuit Online Payroll Plus is your best bet. Take note of our emphasis on weekly payroll, because your payroll frequency has a big impact on your choice. If you only process payroll monthly, the desktop-based QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll is cheaper. With 12 pay periods triggering fewer direct deposit fees, Enhanced Payroll costs about $411.80 compared to $630 for Online Payroll Plus.

If you need to process payroll for more than 1 employer identification number, QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll is the clear winner. At 52 pay periods per year, our chart shows QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll costs $911.80. For 2 or 3 companies, that cost doesn’t change. For QuickBooks Online Payroll Plus, it jumps to $1260 for 2 companies and $1890 for 3. That’s a jump of 38% and 107% respectively.

Outside of the Intuit offerings, the Small Biz paperless option from Paychex was the next cheapest solution – but it’s 136% more expensive than QuickBooks Online Payroll. That extra cost comes with a few compromises: there’s no straightforward QuickBooks GL integration and manual checks would have to be produced for every employee not using direct deposit. If we consider the Paychex Flexible and ADP Compliance with Pay Convenience packages, the cost difference is even greater. Paychex Flexible is 543% more than QuickBooks Online Payroll, and ADP’s package is 477% more expensive. The Paychex cost ignores the cost of getting printed checks, which needs to be added to produce a fair comparison to ADP. That puts Paychex 612% more than the QuickBooks Online Payroll Price. Opting for QuickBooks Online Payroll results in savings of over $2676 compared to ADP and over $3418 compared to Paychex. Those savings are hard to ignore.

Intuit’s Assisted Payroll is priced much lower than either Paychex or ADP if a firm needs physical pay checks (which would rule out the Paychex paperless offering), but it’s more than 3 times the price of QuickBooks Online Payroll Plus. That extra cost gets Intuit to file and pay payroll taxes, along with supplying W2’s. Since Online Payroll Plus includes the no-cost E-File and E-Pay options and the ability to print W2’s, that’s a price difference of almost $1000 for a 10 employee firm for what amounts to a few mouse clicks each pay period.6 Of course, having an outside payroll processor that files and pays taxes imposes a certain discipline on a company, and some firms may find it worth that extra cost for that reason alone.

For companies using QuickBooks, Online Payroll Plus and QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll offer compelling savings. Current Paychex and ADP customers getting at least some printed checks and paying rates equivalent to our quotes could cut costs by 90% and 80%, respectively. A 10 employee firm setting up weekly payroll for the first time would face total costs7 of $12 to $18 per week. Those are numbers that are hard to beat.

(+2 rating, 12 votes)

There’s a third option, Household, at $20 per month, but we’ll skip it for terms of this comparison. [↩]
Intuit doesn’t make it clear that Online Plus supports 1099 contractors, but the virtually identical Plus product from Intuit subsidiary PayCycle does, as this PayCycle product comparison table sets forth. [↩]
The monthly charge for Assisted Payroll covers up to 15 employees. Beyond 15, add $1 per employee per pay period. Assisted Payroll isn’t available in IN and WY. [↩]
ADP also offers a debit card option, which can be an attractive option for lower-paid workers that use banking services less frequently. Offering the option can be a way to increase overall acceptance of electronic payment of payroll. [↩]
For a copy of our original data, check out our 2008 Payroll Comparison. [↩]
Because of the pricing structure for Assisted Payroll, the price difference grows rapidly for firms with more than 15 employees that pay on a frequency such as a weekly. For example, every employee paid weekly causes the price difference between Assisted and Online Payroll to grow by $104 per year. [↩]
This cost doesn’t include costs for payroll check and form printing, if they’re required. [↩]