I’ve been using Quickbooks since I incorporated my business in 1995 and hired employees. At one time, I had 3 employees and used a payroll service for payroll and taxes. That worked well for me when I had employees, but was too expensive to justify when I downsized and had only one employee – myself. So I went to payroll software, in this case Quickbooks Payroll because it integrated with Quickbooks and was the only game in town. I started out with Quickbooks Enhanced Payroll, which does your payroll and also will (in theory) input the data into the 941’s for your quarterlies, and the 940 at the end of the year. I was never able to get the program to properly reflect the figures from the payroll in the quarterly reports. My bookkeeper ended up gathering the numbers and filling out the forms manually. Some of the problems were due to me not always inputting the data into the program properly. But making corrections in the program that could then result in accurate quarterly reports proved to be a puzzle we were never able to solve. The online help was all but useless and certainly incomplete. There was and still is no written manual for the program available, either from Intuit or licensed third parties, although there are plenty of both for Quickbooks itself. That fact is astonishing when you consider that over a million people use the Payroll program. That seems like a deliberate strategy, designed to get you to sign up for paid monthly support, or give up and use their payroll service, also for a monthly fee. Which is to say that the program is deliberately half crippled so that they can extract money from you elsewhere. After a couple of years I gave up on Enhanced Payroll and went to Basic. The only difference between the 2 is that Basic does not populate the Quarterly and Yearly forms, which I could never get it to do anyway. Basic Payroll went up from $100 a year to $130 a year this past January. I found that irritating, because nothing about the program has changed in the 5 years I have been using it, except the tax tables. I could not see what justified a 30% increase. I have continued to have problems with the program. Today my bookkeeper Pat was showing me where, in this quarter for each payroll I did, there’s a place in a report where everything is supposed to zero out (happy time), but did not (unhappy time, you have to chase down an error). But she checked my data input, which was correct for all of my payrolls, so QB Payroll is not posting it properly. As usual, my trusty accountant fixes things at the end of year. By the way QB Payroll Basic costs $130 a year, and Enhanced Payroll costs $250 a year. For that extra $120, it will fill out the 941’s and some other forms for you. That’s the only difference. Those you still have to download from the IRS to populate. Enhanced Payroll allows you to do payroll for up to only 3 employees. More than that, and they want $350 a year. My guess is that the only difference between the 2 is the stop switch they put in Enhanced Payroll so you can’t do more than 3 employees and the cost You’re probably beginning to notice a pattern here. Periodically (about every 3 years) they force you to upgrade Quickbooks to the newest version. If you want to continue to use the Payroll Software, you have to upgrade. They have always done this on the calendar year end when you renew your subscription. Not this time. A month ago I got a notice from Intuit telling me that my payroll subscription would be canceled as of May 31 if I did not upgrade to Quickbooks Pro 2010 from QB Pro 2007 before then (for another $200.00) What is particularly odd about their timing is that my subscription is prepaid for the entire calendar year until 12/31/10, leaving 7 months yet to do. Oh yeh, they’ll refund you the balance I can think of no good motive on their part for them to do this at this time. They so conveniently make it hard for you, as you are not switching software at the end of the year or even at the end of the quarter. It’s a bad economy and they want to extort some money from their captive installed customer base whom they figure won’t see many other good options and just grumble and pay. All that is bad enough, except that my Compaq computer at the shop is 5 ½ years old and not powerful enough to run Quickbooks Pro 2010, which means I will have to spend $500 to $1000 to buy a new computer so that I can allow Intuit to rip me off. But I have a couple of programs on that computer from little guy piano software developers which won’t run on anything past XP, and aren’t likely to be upgraded to Windows 7 anytime soon, or at all. Or I could spend another $200 and get Windows 7 Professional that will may or may not run these XP programs. And oh, did I mention that quite a few people are having problems getting QB Pro 2010 to install on Windows 7? Overwhelmed with disgust, I started to search for other options for payroll. I usually don’t replace my computer until it dies or starts getting psychotic. I want to keep Old Paint plugging along for now. I am happy to report that I have found what appears to be a very attractive alternative, dear reader. There’s a program called Payroll Mate 2010 available for $99 per year subscription. I downloaded a free trial, and it’s a peppy little program that does payroll and nothing else. It is very logically laid out and simple because all it does is payroll. It will print paychecks, run payroll, do any reports you would need. The 940’s and 941’s and other forms you need are part of the program. The program will populate the forms, which are in the program already. It looks to be a very nice program that will meet my payroll needs and those of most small businesses. They are writing an export to Quickbooks feature, but I don’t know when that will be ready. They already have a Quicken.qif export feature I will have to make Journal entries into Quickbooks so that it reflects my payroll. But I pay myself biweekly, so I am only going to do that 26 times a year, and there’s not that much to do. The proof is in the pudding, but I can’t wait to get away from Quickbooks Payroll. It’s a WCPOS. I’ll use Quickbooks Pro 2007 until I don’t have a machine that will run it, or my accountant won’t allow me. I recognize that what I have shared won’t apply to most of you sole proprietor readers, but there are some of us out there who do payrolls, and this is aimed at them. For anyone who wants to look, you can find Payroll Mate 2010 at realtaxtools.com for anyone who wants to have a gander. Will Truitt -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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