This article contains excerpts from Firm of The Future Article
1. Intuit Full Service Payroll
For all our clients that are very “needy” and use to call twice a week to ask the same payroll related payroll questions, I refer them to IFSP. We charge our clients to help them set it up and show them how to use it. Also to review the quarterly payroll forms and W-2’s that Intuit files. And finally we integrate their paychecks into QuickBooks to automatically download and avoid double data entry.
Most of our clients pay under $100 per month to Intuit for this service, depending on number of employees. Intuit takes care of all the payroll tax forms filling, tax deposit impounding, paycheck calculation, and W-2 generation, and most importantly they will support the client on all those pesky phone calls that we no longer have to respond to.
We even have a few clients that we pay for the service directly and resell it to the client (with a profit of course), wow these are for the ones that are really accountant-dependent, if you know what I mean. Typically these clients have a large number of employees and for us, administratively, it just makes sense to outsource it.
This service can integrate to both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop versions by exporting the data into the ledger.
2. QuickBooks Online Payroll (Integrated payroll within QuickBooks Online)
This option is for all my clients that already use QuickBooks Online, pay for their own subscription, and want to create paychecks from WITHIN QuickBooks Online.
This is a highly collaborative environment. Typically our client’s employees are entering timesheets in QuickBooks Online, then the manager or business owner processes payroll and we come in once per month or quarter to process the electronic tax payment and electronic filling for the forms after reviewing them. For the semi-weekly tax depositors, we typically train the client the process the tax payments (tax deposits) and reconcile them against 941 quarterly before filling.
The average client pays Intuit an additional $20-$30 monthly in addition to their QuickBooks Online subscription. What I like about this, is that the client pays for the platform, does all the data-entry type of work, and we do what I love which is to review the books, prepare tax forms to make the client compliant, and give advice on payroll instead of entering paychecks. And best of all, all tech support questions related to day-to-day timesheet and payroll check processing is handled by Intuit.
This service can integrate only with QuickBooks Online.
3. Intuit Online Payroll for Accounting Professionals
This is really the best of both worlds. This provides me with the cloud-based platform for us or our clients to enter time-sheet data and process paychecks.; while allowing us to charge for the full payroll service fee. We can choose to give our clients access to just paychecks, or choose to give them tax payment / tax form filling capability. This flexibility allows us to choose the level of payroll service the client is looking for.
This service gives the clients the same access to payroll features they would have if the went to Intuit to purchase QuickBooks Online Payroll, while we (as the accountants) pay for the services at a wholesale/discounted price of course; and then bundle the service with our current full service payroll offerings. Essentially, this is the best choice when clients want to outsource the payroll to their accountants and be able to process their paychecks on the cloud.
This service can integrate to QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online by exporting the data into the ledgers
See these articles for more info:
https://blog.accountants.intuit.com/?p=23530&s_cid=E-NEWS_PAP
