Twitter Spaces Recap: Payroll Subscription Changes

Welcome back to our next Twitter Spaces recap.  The following is a slightly edited transcript of our recent Twitter Spaces chat about the recent Payroll Subscription changes and what you can expect from your QuickBooks Payroll subscription going forward.

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This week we will be sharing a discussion about payroll subscription changes. We had some guest speakers for this event:

Cindy Lee, QuickBooks Desktop Payroll Marketing
Leah Wetzlel, product leader over QuickBooks Online for Accountants

Hi everyone, thanks for joining. My name is Cindy Lee, and I work on the QuickBooks Desktop Payroll Marketing team. Recently, we made an announcement that as of June 1st, 2022 will no longer be selling two QuickBooks Desktop Payroll services. One is Desktop QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll for Accountants, and the other is the QuickBooks Desktop Assisted Payroll. We're doing this because we're streamlining our QuickBooks Desktop Payroll offerings and investing in the future of our flagship QuickBooks Online payroll. This focus will allow us to deliver more technology, features, automation, and development support in QuickBooks Online Payroll.

As a quick breakdown to the changes:
- Stop sell of these two offerings only applies to to new subscribers, meaning those who don't already have these services
- Existing subscribers to Desktop QuickBooks Enhanced Payroll for Accountants or Desktop Assisted Payroll are not affected and can continue to use those services. They will continue to receive support and renew as normal.
- Desktop Enterprise Diamond subscribers will still include assisted payroll or they can also look into the QuickBooks Online for Accountants

Next up is Leah, to talk about QuickBooks Online Accountant.
Amazing, thank you so much for having me today. My name is Leah Wetzel and I am a product manager on the QuickBooks Online Accountant team. For those of you not yet familiar with QuickBooks Online for Accountants, it is a partner product to QuickBooks Online, and it's made explicitly for accounting professionals. QuickBooks Online Accountant is the one place where you can grow your practice and scale your impact across all your clients and all of your services for your firm. Every QuickBooks Online Accountant company includes a free QuickBooks Online Advanced subscription. In addition to QuickBooks Online Payroll and QuickBooks Time subscriptions, this allows you to manage your bookkeeping payroll and time activities for your firm, and it's all included as part of your QuickBooks Online Accountant file.

When we think about how we enable you to grow your practice today, QuickBooks Online Accountant equips you with the knowledge to serve your clients, including free self-paced training, which is especially helpful for those not familiar with the online ecosystem. You can choose from video webinars and virtual conferences, whichever meets your needs. You'll earn CPA CPE credits along the way and become prepared to take our QuickBooks certification exams. Becoming a certified ProAdvisor also makes you eligible to publish a listing on our Find a ProAdvisor directory. This marketplace allows you to market your services and get new clients. Once you're ready to onboard your clients, you'll also get access to ProAdvisor preferred pricing or best-in-class discount program just for accounting professionals.

Once you've onboarded those clients, QuickBooks Online Accountant makes it easy to serve them all from one place. To better help you do your payroll, we've introduced the payroll insights experience, which is a dashboard to view all your processing dates, blockers, tax payments and other important information in one place to help you stay compliant and resolve issues quickly. You can click on a task that takes you directly into your client's books to complete the work. Then for those serving bookkeeping and tax clients, we have account-specific features to help you manage your workflow from clean up to monthly bookkeeping and tax filing. You can do it all from QBOA. With online you can access data from any device anywhere that has Internet access, and the benefits of that include that you can be mobile, you can do multi-user collaboration, and you can quickly switch from device to device based on where you are and what you're doing. You'll also have real-time access to data and oversight into your client's book, enabling you to provide them support in real-time. It also removes desktop data integrity issues, and I no longer need to travel to your client sites.

At this point I'm going to turn it over to Andrew to dive deeper into QuickBooks online payroll. Take it away, Andrew.

Thanks Leah. Hi everyone. So we're here to talk a little bit about Online Payroll, and we know Online Payroll has been a concern for some of you folks, so I'm here to highlight what some of the benefits are to the Online Payroll offering that QuickBooks now offers. The first is around general technology improvements, so the performance of the product is now in a much better state than it was, you know, a few years ago, even a couple of years ago. Now we're proud to say that it can handle more than 150 employees without seeing significant lag time in the browser pages loading.

The other benefit is a simplification, so we're going from about now, believe it or not, eleven online payroll products that we had down to three, and those three are now called QuickBooks Core Payroll, Premium Payroll, and Elite payroll. You can get those three versions of payroll with or without QuickBooks. So you can have payroll by itself, or you can get payroll first, and then at a later time, you can decide you want to add you know QuickBooks accounting part of it and vice versa. You can add the accounting for the first payroll later or add them all together. So simplification is also there now regarding some of the online payroll features.

You know some of the biggest things to consider are around taxes, so you'll hear the term worry-free taxes. You know our auto tax is really about an online payroll. Will calculate, file, and pay your payroll taxes for you to the appropriate government agency on your behalf if you want. If you want more flexibility and control, you can turn auto tax off. So a bit more like traditional DIY, and you can do those things yourself, so the option is really up to you whether you want us to do the taxes on your behalf, put it on a schedule, and just kind of really not think about it or you can continue to yourself by turning auto tax off.

Another big feature with online payroll is more cash on hand for the employer for longer periods, and that really plays with either next day direct deposit, or if you upgraded to a premium payroll then you're getting same day direct deposit. This means you have until payday 7:00 AM to process that payroll so that direct deposit lands in the employees bank account later that afternoon. So if there is an emergency if you need it, you can process payroll in advance if you prefer that flexibility.

The new online offerings are all also about motivating your team and so you can now manage HR and employee benefits from your one account. We partner with benefits providers to give your employers and employees access, so some are different competitive price benefit plans related to health, vision, dental, and retirement. And if you're paying for Premium or Elite then you'll get HR features as well such as tools templates, and if you're paying for Elite you'll actually get access to an HR advisor as needed. Another cool feature that comes with payroll Elite is if you have auto tax turned on it will pay up to $25,000 in penalties and interest if you get a penalty due to an error in the system.

Also really cool is time tracking. Today typically you would buy QuickBooks on its own, and you could buy Payroll on its own, and you used to be able to buy QuickBooks Time (formerly T sheets) on its own. Now with payroll, if you opt to purchase Payroll Premium, then that version of QuickBooks time premium or QuickBooks Time Elite will now be integrated or bundled with your payroll offering for the one price. So with this basically you're getting access to QB Time Premium or QB Time Elite depending on if you have payroll Premium or payroll Elite. Which means you can do things like track time on the go and allow your employees to clock in and clock out for their mobile device. If it's on QB time Elite, then it also comes with the geofencing technology. And of course the time tracking those hours collect can be approved by the lawyer or the accountant, and once approved they automatically get aggregated and pulled into the run payroll flow for you to expedite running payroll. With this time tracking you can now tag your hours to things like customers projects that will all be allocated back to customers and projects for your reporting in QBO so that it all works nicely today.

Another feature has to do with 1099 e-filing services. Those are included in the regular service fees for supporting contractor payments. Auto payroll, also comes with all three SKUs Core, Premium, and Elite. This is basically thought of as putting your payroll on cruise control for eligible employees. In order to be eligible, they would be salaried employees, or they'd be hourly employees with default hours - really for employees where payroll doesn't change a whole lot. Say you have ten employees, and they're all salaried or they all have specific hours this employer becomes a good candidate for auto payroll. Where essentially you set it and forget it. And instead of having to come in to the product every week or every two weeks to run your payroll, it's going to run automatically behind the scenes. Leading up to that date QuickBooks will send emails, and text notifications just reminding you that your payroll is sort of in-flight if you need to make any last-minute changes, please do so now otherwise you know it's gonna be sort of done On this date. This especially works well when you're paying employees by direct deposit because then you know you're also not preparing checks, it's just everything is sort of automated nicely.

Another area that we offer with Online Payroll is expert support. This is really about speaking with an expert over the phone or by chat. If you opt to get Premium or Elite payroll, the experts will also be available to review your payroll set up the first time you come in. The expert will be able to help you complete that setup on your behalf, sort of like a white-glove service. All come with them, and then there's the whole suite I touched on earlier beyond Payroll offering. This includes things like, getting HR assistance, there's a whole tab for HR workers comp, plans available through a partner called Intego for workers comp. Health benefits specific to dental, vision, and medical through a partner call Insured, and then lastly retirement plan are available for the employer and their staff (most commonly for 401Ks.)

The last piece is just around payroll reporting. Similar to Desktop, Online you can customize reports, run, print, export, and share your valuable insights with your accountant. These payroll reports cover multiple worksites, payroll deductions/ contributions, your tax liabilities, payroll tax summaries, time activities, vacation and sick leave balances for your staff, and workers comp. So when you start pulling reports in QBO whether it's your balance sheet or your income statement or a P&L for customer projects, you'll be able to know that will include the payroll and all the line items that are coming from it.

The last thing I just want to close off on 'cause I know this is one thing that Desktop Payroll is quite good at is this idea of 'after the fact payroll' which is really just about the businesses already run payrolls and processed payrolls. Traditionally with online payroll this was a bit more guarded and locked down. So we restricted this concept of 'after the fact payroll' to the full-service online payroll offerings, which is what Core, Premium, and Elite now are. Still, progress is being made to allow for some of this functionality. I'll give you an example, we're continuing to expand your ability to enter some prior payroll data and correct past payroll runs. You can currently correct or add any payroll if the tax payments aren't due yet. You can also have us add or edit any payroll even if the payments or filing have happened by calling us. And you're going to be able - in the near future - to edit/ delete/ void historical paychecks out of order, if you wish, they'll show as adjustment checks.