QuickBooks Tip: Intuit Teams Up with Leading Payroll Providers

It’s about time! In addition to offering its own built-in payroll service, Intuit has finally partnered with several major payroll service providers, including ADP and Paychex, to offer a comprehensive integration with QuickBooks Online.

While there are other accounting software suites that offer similar payroll integrations, QuickBooks users account for more than 80% of the small business market, which makes this both a long-anticipated and welcomed change for accountants and small businesses.

Simplification through integration

Payroll has traditionally been a monotonous task, and is further complicated by federal, state, and local municipalities’ withholding and reporting requirements. Managing the payroll process and other HR functions can be a difficult and time-consuming task for many businesses. Over the last 20 years, this has given rise to many third-party payroll providers that allow businesses to outsource a majority of their human resources functions for a set price. Outsourcing has become increasingly attractive over the years due to innovations in technology and improved efficiencies.

The recent integration of QuickBooks Online with major companies in the payroll and HR solutions market looks to  streamline, in real-time, payroll processing and make the accounting function even more manageable and simplified for many small businesses.

According to Paychex, “the new integration allows users to quickly and easily connect data from the Paychex GLS, so it flows directly into their QuickBooks Online accounting package through a convenient ‘Link and Sync’ tool in Paychex GLS. Through the integration, users can post payroll entries to their QuickBooks journal entry in just seconds, helping to save time and reduce costly errors.” Instead of creating a manual journal entry in QuickBooks Online, users can now link or download their payroll data from their respective payroll provider.

Turning data into actionable insights

As businesses struggle to keep pace in this fast-moving and ever-changing economy, many foresee  a growing need for value-added services that are also timely. The new payroll integration not only presents time-saving opportunities for accountants and their small business clients but also offers payroll and compensation analytics at their fingertips.

In addition to the QuickBooks Online integration, ADP offers integration of its new benchmarking tool, powered by ADP DataCloud. “Running on ADP DataCloud, the tool is intended to help accountants advise clients by giving them access to information comparing their organizations to similar companies,” said Mark Feffer of HCM Technology report. “Compensation data points include items such as overtime, bonuses, and job tenure, which ADP and many data providers say is often difficult to find.”

This raises the bar for many businesses looking to not only maintain records timely, but also use actionable data to manage operations through informed decision-making. As conventional wisdom says, “anything you can measure, you can manage, and anything you can manage, you can grow.”

You can find more information about these new payroll integrations by visiting your respective payroll provider’s website, contacting the provider’s customer support line or contacting your payroll account representative.

You can also contact me or another member of Kaufman Rossin’s QuickBooks Consulting team for help with getting the most out of QuickBooks for your business.