Payroll Center for Accountants: Office Accounting integrates payroll and offers it at a wholesale price

By Amy Marchant

Payroll Center for Accountants, one of the powerful features in Microsoft Office Accounting, offers you a unique way to perform payroll for your clients who use Office Accounting. You’ll use one dashboard to view multiple clients and get a quick overview of their payroll status in a single glance. These features — and many more — enable you to work with payroll clients efficiently and accurately, and ensure high client satisfaction.

 

Try Out Payroll Center For A Special Price

When you and your clients use Office Accounting and Payroll Center, you become the hub of the payroll process. This position allows Microsoft to provide accountants a wholesale pricing model, saving you and your clients money, says Bob Lewis, Senior Marketing Manager, Accounting Professionals, Microsoft Business Division.

Payroll Center’s annual fee is $99 — regardless of how many of your clients use the system. Each client on the system costs $9.95 per month.

Good deal: Sign up by March 31 and Microsoft will waive your first year’s $99 annual fee for Payroll Center.

 

How Payroll Center Works

Payroll Center is an online application hosted by ADP that you access directly from Office Accounting. You can easily manage multiple clients’ payroll processes from this one payroll application, says John Scerbo, ADP’s Senior Director of Product Management. And Payroll Center’s tight integration with Office Accounting makes it easy to transfer your payroll data back to the accounting software, he says.

Save time: After payroll is processed, Payroll Center creates payroll journal entries for each client that are easily downloaded into Office Accounting, Scerbo explains. No more re-keying journal entries into your accounting software.

 

Collaborate With Your Clients

Because Payroll Center is an online application, you can give your clients access and collaborate on the payroll process with them, Scerbo says. Not only can you perform all payroll functions on your clients’ behalf, you can share responsibilities with your clients as well. For example, your client can enter and make changes to their company and employee information in the payroll application. You can then provide payroll and tax expertise to your clients by using Payroll Center to calculate the payroll and create your client’s signature-ready tax forms. Instead of your having to print and deliver checks, your clients can access the payroll application to print their own checks and payroll reports, Scerbo says.

More teamwork: The Payroll Center helps you and your clients work together with reminders. For example, the application will remind both of you that payroll taxes are due or that it’s time to print W2s, Scerbo notes.

Best practice: You decide each client’s level of autonomy, recommends Scerbo. You’ll want some clients to enter their own hours or deliver their own checks, while with others you’ll want to keep full control of the reins.

 

The Payroll Features You Need

Following are some of Payroll Center’s prime features, according to Scerbo and Lewis.

• Unlimited service and support for CPAs from ADP payroll professionals.

• Changes you make in Office Accounting — address, employee information, and so forth — are automatically synchronized with Payroll Center.

• Full gross-to-net preview before you process payroll. A preview also shows hours, taxes, and so forth and allows you to make changes before you process payroll.

• Multi-level security within the application.

• No need to download tax tables since Payroll Center automatically updates any tax change as soon as it takes effect.

• “Smart” tax forms allow you to edit federal and state forms online, and they will automatically recalculate the payroll liability. 

• If you print checks for your client, you can use each client’s individual check stock or choose to print all of your clients’ checks directly on blank check stock.

• Doing payroll online gives you and your clients more flexibility as to when and where you process payroll.

 

Payroll Center for Accountants Gives You More Time And More Money

Simplicity is one of Payroll Center’s greatest assets, according to Scerbo. You can process payroll in as few as four clicks. Wizards help you set up clients and their employees fast. Tax forms are pre-filled and can be edited online making them signature-ready.

“You’re always on top of and can see the moving parts for multiple clients,” Lewis notes.

“Payroll is a critical and important service for accountants to provide to their client base,” says Beth Siegrist, Vice President of Software Solutions at ADP. You can provide one-stop shopping for your clients. Using Payroll Center reduces your payroll time, freeing up time for more profitable ventures like business advisory services, she says.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Microsoft.