QuickBooks Payroll

The payroll service is really easy overall. All the tasks that I use are quite simple to navigate around, including adding new employees, paying employees, and sending out payroll liability payments. These are what I do most often and they've been really simplified by Quickbooks.

Other functions that I use are payroll deductions (401k, etc), tracking sick/vacation time, and managing direct deposit.

Another feature I like (part of QB Online, not sure about Desktop), is that employees are emailed a link to join their payroll management website, where they can access payroll stubs, W2's etc. It has made managing a lot of the HR parts of hiring employees much more streamlined.

Not really a con, but I don't have any experience with any of the direct competitors, e.g. Freshbooks, Sage, Xero, etc., so I can't say if Quickbooks does anything better or worse than those others.

But what I can say is that I did switch from Quickbooks Desktop to Quickbooks Online, which is a much better experience overall (although more expensive).

It's easy to use and is excellent accounting software for small-to-mid-size businesses that need complete payroll services. The tax tables are regularly updated, the options to file your tax forms via your online accounts is the best.

The desktop version of Quickbooks is $500/year which is a fair amount of money.

Ease of implementation and constant guidance available from customer service to resolve any issue. Also the ability to access and run payroll from any device that can reach the internet provides so much productivity.

The Elite payroll service seems so restrictive. I cannot access many of the settings or execute many of the functions that I could through the Core payroll service. To change these settings I need to go through customer service, which was very confusing and frustrating during the implementation of the payroll service.