ZenPayroll launches modern payroll service for accountants and bookkeepers
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
Using our new functionality, accountants and bookkeepers can now offer modern payroll to their clients, and manage all of them from a free centralized dashboard.
There's a growing trend of small businesses outsourcing their back-office. These business owners are strapped for time and are juggling many different balls all at once. Independent service providers are there to help but they're dependent on the tools they use, which unfortunately have usually been overly complex and expensive.
With the rise of modern SaaS tools, these accountants and bookkeepers can now offer a much more compelling service to their clients, streamline their business, and hopefully expand.
We're thrilled to be a part of this shift and if anyone ever has any feedback/questions/thoughts to share, I can be reached directly at josh@zenpayroll.com
How soon do you expect to have full coverage in the United States?
Thanks for putting together an accountant specific dashboard. I will be looking into it shortly and wish your team the best of luck.
We're starting our roll out to other states this quarter and will eventually have much of the US covered soon.
Just curious -- you mentioned that ADP offers hefty referral bonuses to accountants. Can you elaborate more on what they are?
It was painless -- and cheap. On top of that, Paychex has had our back with hands-on personal customer service when things went wrong due to the usual paperwork screwups by NY State.
I'm truthfully not sure what Paychex could do better. This isn't an area where -- as a tech company -- we want things to be particularly technologically complex. A real person makes all the difference to us, and its not like Paychex is a significant cost for what they do, reliably.
Truthfully, I don't know why you'd badmouth them as "legacy solutions" that "don't really work". They've worked great for us, especially as we've expanded to offices in multiple cities and states, with all the attendant per-locale paperwork overhead.
And secondarily, perhaps relatedly, but what kinds of organizations are not a good fit with ZenPayroll?
Meaning, how niche is ZenPayroll—really targeting companies of, say, less than 20 employees, or is it actually a good fit for everybody and ADP et al are just winning with brand awareness currently?
If your company operates outside of California, we may not be a good fit at the moment, since we only support California-based companies at the moment. However, we'll be adding multi-state support by the end of this quarter.
I'm more concerned with being able to integrate payroll with Expensify and Quickbooks. Typically the biggest headaches come from having to move this data from one application to the other.
Our small business has been with ZenPayroll since the beginning of the year and we love it. Very easy to use, and we're hoping to add more employees in the near future.
You guys have solved a major pain point for small businesses. Keep it up!
Since you're a customer, keep a look out in your inbox for an announcement on the Quickbooks IIF export soon!
We'll have Quickbooks IIF export by the end of this month.
Regarding moving data seamlessly between ZenPayroll and other applications -- it's something we're actively working on right now, with a particular emphasis on seamlessly integrating with major time, attendance, reimbursement, and expense reporting applications.
http://imgur.com/wuOnXUb - Retina MBP + Mountain Lion + Chrome
>The bank account information you provide in order to complete payroll processing is secured using the same technology that banks use. ZenPayroll employees never have access to this information and it is fully encrypted and stored securely in our system.
This can't be true can it? Surely an admin/dev has access to the crypto procedures and the key has to exist somewhere, right? At some point the key has to meet the encrypted data and if they are sending ACH or other payments, surely the "inaccessible to employees" data has to be decrypted and sent, right?
Is this just layman speak for "Rhonda the Receptionist can't see your account number"?
I'm updating the text on the security page to clarify more. Thanks!
I meant the question to be more from a technological standpoint. Anxious to see what you come up with. That's a wobbly road when you start trying to differentiate.
"Most of our employees don't have access...", uh, "Many of our employees can not access...", hmm, "In the case of sudden...", no, "Should there be an issue...", uh...
The last time ZenPayroll made the front page, I (and others) were skeptical about the ability to usurp some of the bigger players. Targeting second party payroll providers is a superb idea. In fact, as someone who dabbled in low-key book keeping services to help me pay for school, something like this would have been wonderful. This is how business becomes more efficient. Waiting on Canada...
Wave does Payroll in US and Canada: https://www.waveapps.com/payroll/
Our support team would be more than happy to answer any questions you or anyone might have: https://support.waveapps.com/forums
The date entry when creating a report is slightly strange and difficult to quickly enter the desired date (maybe this is a Canadian vs. American thing?).
When you view an account activity statement (a cash account for example) there is no total for the account as of the chosen date, just a running tally of debits and credits. I had to rerun a new balance sheet each time I wanted to see the cash account balance at a different date.
A quick "last fiscal year" report option or a few different common date ranges like in QB would also be helpful as it was tedious to click through the date calendar and select Jan 1 and Dec 31 every time I wanted a full year report.
I apologize if I missed some options and this is a misguided rant. I was only in the software for a couple of hours but it seemed rather difficult to obtain basic data.