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Comment by supercanuck | Hacker News Reader

I am a one-man-band with an S corp. I would love, love love it if something like ZenPayroll would help me with the 941's, state taxes, and eftps but its too hard to justify offloading that stuff at $30/mo ... $360/yr... when Bank Of America offers their kludgy software for free with my business checking account and when that fails, just manually process them.

It has been a constant inconvenience of mine since I incorporated myself 6 years ago.

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I'm with you! I just posted this on the other ZP thread:

"I setup payroll awhile ago and it took me a long time to find a provider. I remember looking at Intuit, ADP (for a second), and SurePayroll; I think I'm also on the ZenPayroll invite list.

After going through some of the threads on HN I decided to use BOA -- which is essentially Intuit -- and although it was a pain to setup, it does seem to be working. (Total cost: $30/month)

However, the Wave Accounting team reached out to me recently to let me know that they'll begin a full service payroll SAAS in January with pricing at $5/person. You can bet I'll be trying it out.

Sadly we're too small for ZenPayroll's pricing to make sense at this time."

Wave's solution sounded good, until the part where they mention for automated tax deposits it's an extra 25/user so it becomes the same prices as most other providers.

Wave payroll developer here. Extra $25/month for the company, not per user or employee.

You guys might want to change the verbiage, I thought it said per employee but you're right it says per employer. Still seems weird to say 25 per employer per month, especially when that seems to be the standard fee structure for most other services - http://wavepayroll.com/pricing/

Is there some type of IRS cost associated with providing deposits that changes the cost from $5 to $25?

In the US there are many agencies you have to deal with and a lot of paperwork that must be filed. Unlike Canada where you tax based on the work-location and pay everything to the federal government, the US has all sorts of fun rules that mean you could be remitting taxes to multiple state/county/local agencies. And each agency has a different level of technology savvy so you could be faxing/mailing forms to get a particular tax paid.

So calculating gross->net scales nicely, but paying the fed/state/county/local agencies doesn't. And aside from the actual costs of providing the service, it's a tremendous value to the employer. Even at low hourly wages that $25 pays for itself.

I just shot you an email to try to see if you'd be interested in trying out ZenPayroll as well! We strive to be the most delightful payroll software out there. Part of this is making the initial setup process as painless as possible. Getting setup takes less than 10 minutes for most companies we've onboarded.

Thanks for the email. I'm happy to poke around ZP but for me to switch from what we have "working" to ZP (which would cost more, means that ZP would need to blow my pants off amazing).

Up for the challenge?

Definitely up for the challenge :). Our goal is that our software isn't enough to just "work". It has to delight you as well :)

One of the ZenPayroll founders here. We definitely take care of all payroll-related tax and compliance deposits and forms for you, including 941, DE-9, and state compliance forms (such as new employee hire report forms).

Your only interface is through our single-page app, so no messing with kludgy government software (like the EFTPS software) or and paper forms.

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