The company behind QuickBooks, Intuit, announced it is releasing an expanded suite of online payroll offerings to help small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) automate payroll and tax filing, according to a press release.
The suite has built-in tax penalty protection and helps with access to services like human resources (HR), benefits and compensation for injured workers.
The suite comes in three options: Core, Premium and Elite. It usually takes a SMBs a week or more to prepare payroll, Intuit said, and QuickBooks Online Payroll is designed to cut that time by a significant amount, so an owner can focus on other aspects of running a business.
“The expanded QuickBooks Online Payroll suite focuses on three benefits for our customers: automation, accuracy and additional services,” said Laurent Sellier, vice president and business leader of QuickBooks Online Payroll. “By automating payroll and tax filing, and by offering access to additional on-demand services, the expanded QuickBooks Online Payroll suite helps meet the end-to-end needs of small businesses. And of course, it works automatically with QuickBooks Online, so small business owners can pay, manage and grow their teams all while managing their books.”
The Core service has features like auto payroll and next-day direct deposit, and the premium service has a same-day direct deposit as well as access to an HR support center. The Elite option has tax penalty protection and an on-demand HR advisor.
Intuit said about 70 percent of businesses say they have HR questions they aren’t prepared for, and having a dedicated HR team to be able to contact is meant to counteract that. Intuit also said that the service will save time overall.
“Small business owners spend on average 4.5 hours each pay period preparing, calculating and filing payroll taxes,” Intuit said. “By automating paying employees and taxes, as well as tracking time on the go with TSheets, the new QuickBooks Online Payroll suite saves small business owners valuable time each payroll cycle by eliminating manual data entry and reducing errors.”