Patriot Payroll Reviews

I like the ease of use and user-friendly interface and dashboard.

I think that the timeline when processing payroll isn't as advantageous to small businesses as more expensive options like ADP can be. Although it's not as costly as ADP it required payroll to be funded about a week ahead of check dates which can be challenging for a new, small field service company.

I have been a customer of Patriot Payroll for about 5 years and I typically file my year end employment forms i.e., 1099s myself. However, I was unable to file paper copies of these forms for tax year 2022 and Patriot Payroll was invaluable to me because they offered inexpensive and easy to use electronic filing. During the 5+ years that my small business has been a customer, Patriot Payroll has provided my company with the peace of mind of knowing that once a payroll is submitted, our employees will receive their paychecks via direct deposits on time. Now, I also know that I can depend on Patriot Payroll to accurately and quickly electronically file important year end tax forms.

In the 5+ years that my small business has been a customer, only once did I have a problem with Patriot's software. I called Patriot's toll-free customer support line and the issue was quickly resolved by one the company's knowledgeable, caring and courteous staff.

Ease of use, simple interface, reports,

Tax filings, lack of email notifications

I've been using Patriot's payroll system for several years. What struck me from the very beginning was how straightforward everything was in setting up my company, my employees, health insurance contributions, and direct deposit. My first payroll took only a matter of minutes. Literally! And they do all the tax filings that used to take me hours and later, that my accountant charged thousands of dollars to do each year! If all that's not reason enough to love them, their customer service is outstanding. The agents are well-informed, helpful, and very patient!

I use a separate program for accounting and another for invoicing. It would be nice to do them all in one place. It appears I'm not alone. They have now added those services but I have not yet made the switch.

We absolutely love Patriot Payroll! It is very easy to set up and use. We feel very confident in the service and having our taxes collected, deposited, and recorded saves us both time and money. Although we've only had to contact customer service a handful of times, the response time is quick and the representatives are so friendly and patient. Great work Patriot!

Honestly, there's not a thing I dislike.

Ease of use; personable customer support (a phone call away); affordable; peace of mind.

I can't think of anything I don't like about this software.

Easy to use and navigate site. Reporting features a huge plus for a small company

The immediate set up was not easy for me until o realized I could call or chat for help

It was very easy to understand and use. Lot's of support when needed.

Never had any problems using the software and getting the info I needed

The customer service and support is wonderful. I can always talk to a live agent. Its easy to use and make payroll and direct deposit easy. Saves me time with the employee portal my employees can enter their hours and then all I have to do is approve it.

It took a while to get quicker direct deposit.

How easy it has been to use and navigate through.

My old software I used provided a countdown to the last day I could submit payroll and it still be processed on time. I miss that feature.

Their support! After leaving Intuit Payroll for Patriot, their "knowledgable" and available help was a refreshing change!

There is not an "auto" payroll for my clients that have the same payroll each time. With that added feature, Patriot Payroll would just about be perfect in my opinion.

I signed up as a Partner and got 50% discount off the retail rates. I like that the full service payroll handles all the tax remittances and reporting. Plus, I generated W-2s with the click of a button.

My biggest disappointment was the 4 day lead time on Direct Deposit. We typically set up pay periods to end on Saturday, so we had to run payroll on Monday in order to make direct deposit show up on Friday. That left no cushion of time and a holiday pushed the direct deposit back to the following Monday!

The "solution" was to Prefund the Payroll by giving Patriot a "Deposit" that they used for each payroll and then "refilled" to the set amount. Luckily, this worked for my some of my clients, but many of them can't afford to tie up that much cash. This may be a deal breaker for some companies.

We use Patriot Software in a wide variety of industries (restaurant, retail, day care, and more). I love how I can set it up for a client, and show them briefly how to run their own payroll. Very easy for simply payrolls.

My biggest pet peeve is the inflexibility of making tax adjustments. For Example: a restaurant where they pay out tips each night means that a check would be for sever hours only, usually about $40 for the week. The tips justify enough taxes that they end up with a negative paycheck. In any other system I can manually adjust the taxes held to get the check to zero or close. (the server ends up owing money at the end of the year). With PS, I have to come up with other options for getting the paycheck to zero (like getting the business to cover the taxes in the meantime).

Patriot Software Payroll is very easy to use! It is very simple to make any adjustments to the employee files and also to print off any necessary reports. I can always find what I am looking for!

The only feature that I find frustrating, is when I am inputting the information for payroll and then I need to back out of the screen to update an employee file for whatever reason and all of my information that I have entered has to be deleted. It would be better if the information was able to be saved and then edited later, if needed. It is frustrating when you need to make one small change to one employee file and therefore you lose ALL of the input you put in for the other employees and have to re-enter all of the information.

This software was very easy to use, and as my business grows I am finding the necessary features needed are available to me.
Whenever I have called customer service, I usually have gotten a person that is knowledgeable and is able to help me. There have been times that the person called has not been able to help me, and was able to escalate my issue to someone that could.

Changes to setting sometimes allow changes that are incomplete. In 2019, I added the accounting software to Patriot Payroll. I updated settings in "Payroll Integration Options" but missed some. I was able to save the partial data and run a payroll.
When reviewing the accounting journal entry that was generated from the first payroll with the accounting software, I saw the JE generated was incomplete. If I had not checked to verify this JE was correct, this would have been difficult to track down later.
This is a big miss, and there should be some warning or stop to prevent this (incomplete data) from happening.

Patriot has a very simple approach for the layman. If you don't understand they guide you and with patience and ease to get the job done. I highly recommend the payroll software.

I've only used Patriot for just over a month. So far so good.

I am both a scientist and an educator, not a business person by training. Patriot Software was recommended to me by my accountant. I primarily use the payroll features for my small business. It is so easy to use for both myself and employees. I appreciate the fact there is an employee portal. All of the features from running payrolls, to creating W2s is so user-friendly. And when I haven't been sure how to accomplish something the phone in teach support has been amazing. Aside from the product being a wonderful time saver for me to use, it also at a price point that is incredibly reasonable.

This is one of the rare items I have ever used where I have nothing constructive that should be changed. I have been thrilled with all aspects of the Patriot System.

First of all, very affordable. Next, it is very easy to run payroll, the dates are already selected. I just put in the number of hours and download the pay stubs. The reports are very easy to use as well and come in extremely handy when paying taxes, especially at the end of the year!

I was going to say nothing until recently. A new employee started and she is working low hours however the software was not taking out a federal income tax for her. I realize that is a precaution against someone not being liable if they do not make enough, but it is a problem when the company owes monthly federal payments and the system does not accept a $0.00 when the obvious other taxes are being paid. I'm actually going to have to call customer service soon...

Payroll is easy. It takes just a few minutes and there are no hassles.

If you start a payroll, you can't go back and edit employee information without cancelling the payroll and starting over. Also, if you have some employees on direct deposit and others on paper checks, you have to set the pay date based on the constraints of direct deposit. You can't submit the direct deposit for Friday payment, and allow paper check employees to pick-up their checks as soon as they are printed. The checks will be post-dated.

The software is easy to use. Customer service has always been responsive. It is less expensive than QuickBooks but has similar features. New features are frequently added throughout the year, and this includes adapting to new laws for Covid-19.

I cannot yet delegate the timecard approval to a manager without that manager seeing everyone's payroll including the owner.

Ease of performing payroll functions that are beyond my capabilities. Enter all the data and it runs appropriately, collects the taxes, and keeps us legal and current on tax liabilities. These are all functions that would take significantly more time to accomplish without Patriot (and I would be uncertain if they were done correctly).

Several of the tools are difficult to use/understand how best to use such as the PTO/holiday accrual system, paycheck withdrawals, etc. I did figure out how to use them, but once I did, there were "orphan rules" I no longer needed/wanted and no way to delete them (and no way to make them do what I needed, which is why they were abandoned).
The other issue I have had is the way PTO works (rules are limited and I need to make too many manual adjustments). Also, the turnover from 2020 to 2021 was challenging. I had to complete payroll yesterday (1/4/21) before COB and the Patriot Software had a glitch (per my conversation with one of the Patriot representatives) and we were not the only affected company. I did manage to push payroll through, but rather than 30 - 40 minutes running payroll, I spent most of the day. Fixing issues, answering employee questions, etc.
On the timecard, I would like to be able to simply and easily enter 100 or more charging categories for projects. I'm looking for a new solution because there isn't really a simple way to administer that type of requirement in the timecard system

The customer support is very effective and made Implementation process very smooth. The process for logging employee hours and applying deductions are very easy to understand and straightforward. This product has a very user-friendly UI that is clean and very intuitive, this makes reporting very flexible. This is a cost effective solution for small companies as long as you do not need extensive job costing integration into an accounting system.

The direct deposit functionality is very restrictive at times and they require that the payroll is processed by Monday for it to be distributed to the employee's account on Friday. Patriot Payroll does use ADP as a third party to do the direct deposits. This doesn't really work well with our paperless environment. After you have entered hours you can not go back and correct any mistakes you may have made on a payroll deduction. This is frustrating at times. You have to delete the entire payroll, edit the deduction and then re-enter the payroll. This makes the software feel very clunky, an alternative would be to approve the payroll void the incorrect check and then re-run another payroll.

My clients love the fact that they can process payroll in Patriot (especially using direct deposit) and be done with it. Patriot handles direct deposit, federal, state and local tax payments and filings, generating W-2's, generating 1099's for contract workers, etc. It makes it all very simple.

There are really only three things I would like to see changed:
1. If you start a payroll and want to change ANYTHING for ANY employee, you have to abandon all that you have done, change the employee information, and start over. I have clients with 40+ employees and this is something that they dread. I can understand the challenges of allowing the underlying data to be changed, but if it could require just re-entering the employee whose information was changed, that would be huge.
2. If I am helping a client and I want to see what they are seeing, I cannot do it in Patriot. I would love to see a read-only mode for consultants so that we could see what our client is seeing. We do this by screen sharing now, but that is an additional hassle.
3. I would love to see an option to group the data that is downloaded to QB Online, but still shows detail. For example: list every gross payroll item, consolidate employer taxes into one entry, consolidate direct deposit withdrawals into one entry, consolidate employer and employee payroll taxes paid into one entry. I do this as a favor for some of my clients, but it would be great if it were done automatically.

When I signed up for Patriot (YEARS ago!) I wanted something that was user friendly, easy to navigate and had an awesome customer service team behind it. I'm an entrepreneur; not an accountant and I wanted a company that would help whenever I had tax related questions. Patriot has fit the bill for all of that.

The only thing that has been an issue is there have been two times in the last year in which my employees have woken up Friday morning and not had their direct deposit paychecks in their bank account. Given the stressful times of COVID this has caused them (mainly their spouses!) stress wondering where their paychecks have been. Luckily both times I've gotten on chat with Patriot and they've admitted the problem with their bank and have promised the direct deposits would be in by EOD. And they have been. I do hope they can get those kinks worked out bc no one likes to wake up and not have their owed money in their bank accounts. But for what it's worth... the communication about it is AMAZING and most of the time that is more important than anything else.

Patriot is very user friendly and cost effective. Payroll is very easy to run and reports are easy to find and put together.

There are a few items that could use some help:
1st - Payroll Draws could have a section on the payroll run versus backing out and having to go in under the employee first.
2nd - Having the option to pay out a bonus without zeroing out a salary and adding in hours. System requires a 0 salary but 1 hour to pay out a bonus.
3rd - The option to pay out a bonus with only social security and medicare. Almost all payroll companies offer this....what we have to do is change the W4 and then go back and add it back in...that can cause an error that could easily be fixed.
Lastly - No timecard system for Monthly payroll processing. There is a weekly, semiweekly and bi monthly but no option for Monthly. There are still some out there that use this option to pay their employees and not offering a timecard system is a loss to patriot.