OnPay – Review 2020 – PCMag India

Cloud-based payroll service OnPay changed significantly before our last review, and now it’s added even more functionality and flexibility. The site is a complete payroll solution, allowing managers to create comprehensive employee records and run unlimited payrolls each month. It supplies multiple reports that can be easily modified and displayed, including a highly customizable new one. It also handles calculation and payment of all payroll taxes. New features include a dashboard for HR and for tracking conversations about PTO, a document vault, electronic onboarding documents, and revamped employee portals. Its user experience rivals that of Gusto. OnPay is an Editors’ Choice, along with Gusto, because of its successful blend of customizable payroll and HR tools.

OnPay Pricing 

OnPay has maintained its previous price of a flat $36 per month plus $4 per employee per month, which puts it in the midrange of the sites we reviewed. Patriot Software’s Full-Service Payroll has a $25 per month base price ($10 if you’re willing to file and deposit your own taxes), plus $4 per employee per month. Square Payroll, on the other hand, is $29 per month, plus $5 per employee per month. Gusto starts $39 per month, plus $6 per employee per month, but it goes up to a $149 base price plus $12 per person per month.

Setup Assistance With OnPay

Setup is the most labor-intensive, difficult part of using a small business payroll application. Not only are there hundreds of details to enter, but accuracy is also absolutely critical. The work you do here has tremendous impact on your employees’ livelihoods, obviously, as well as their access to company benefits. Additionally, financial agencies don’t look kindly on late, incorrect, or missing payments.

How you set OnPay up for your payroll processing depends largely on whether or not you’ve paid employees before in your current business. If you’re starting a new payroll using OnPay, you’ll be able to go through the entire setup process on your own (though the company can certainly help you as needed). If you have payroll history that needs to be entered, you’ll get a message as you’re going through the online setup process telling you that a payroll specialist will contact you to arrange the import of that data. The company offers a full accuracy guarantee. If any of this historical data is entered incorrectly, OnPay takes total responsibility.

If you’re starting fresh and want to do the setup yourself, you can take advantage of OnPay’s new seven-step setup wizard. You’ll first have to enter basic information about your company, including contact details and owner and officer information. If this is not completed thoroughly and accurately, you won’t be able to proceed with setup. The next five steps involve Reporting Agent Authorization, bank account details, pay schedules (weekly, biweekly, monthly, and so on), worksites, and bank account verification.  

A word about pay schedules here: You can create multiple, unlimited schedules if you like, and you can also pay employees on different schedules. This is more flexible than what other products offer–including Gusto. 

Adding Employees and Benefits

Once you’ve gone through the initial setup, you need to enter employee records. You have two options here. You can either create the entire record yourself or invite employees to enter their own—excluding the details for compensation and other HR-related issues, of course. Patriot Software and others offer similar options. 

If employees have already supplied their personal information, you see that in their records and you can complete the employer portion of the screens. Once you set them up, these records contain all payroll and HR details, including deductions, compensation, time off, and personnel files (more on HR later). OnPay’s employee records are roughly comparable to Gusto’s, though Gusto’s are more compact. 

OnPay has a terrific new employee-records feature, however: custom forms. These are very easy to create and can contain multiple types of data-entry fields, such as text boxes, drop-down lists, and date fields. You could use these in employee records to, for example, track computer equipment.

You need to complete other setup tasks before you can run a payroll: You can define accrual policies, such as how many hours employees have to work to earn PTO, sick time, and so on, as well as what pay types you use (including regular hours, salary, overtime, and bonus). OnPay supports more pay types than other services I’ve reviewed, and it allows you to create your own. It makes good use of custom fields here and elsewhere on the site. In fact, it offers more of these than competitors do (among those that offer any at all).

You’ll also spend a lot of time setting up your deductions—primarily the health insurance and retirement plans you offer. You can define other types of deductions, too, including garnishments. OnPay serves as an insurance broker to help you select and set up employee insurance benefits—health, dental, life, and disability. OnPay’s team will even do research for you and generate quotes.

Another setup task involves connections with third-party services. OnPay can integrate your payroll data with QuickBooks Online, the desktop version of QuickBooks, Xero (OnPay is a certified app partner with Xero), or any of a variety of productivity applications. The site offers powerful account mapping, which helps you set up your payroll in a way that is consistent with the account structure of your accounting application. All the sites I reviewed offer built-in connections to related applications, but SurePayroll has links to the most accounting solutions.

Excellent User Experience

Payroll can be an exasperating, detail-heavy process without the added burden of a confusing, unattractive website supporting it. OnPay provides an excellent user experience that rarely gets in the way of or detracts from operations. Its effective use of color and fonts and graphics provides a pleasant, good-looking environment for what can be a challenging process. It still tends to sprawl, and occasionally requires excessive scrolling. There’s a lot of data to view, and managers want to see as much as possible simultaneously. It’s a challenge.

In addition, the navigation links and their corresponding menus break the site down into small pieces, so you have to learn early on whether you should go to the Payroll, HR, or Company links to get to what you’re looking for. Gusto does a better job of consolidating related tasks. Still, OnPay is a very clean, fast site. 

Navigation is driven by eight icons in the left vertical toolbar. Clicking the Dashboard icon will always take you back to the home screen. The second navigation link opens links to employee and contractor information screens, with additional links for year-end adjustments, new employees, and an hours worksheet. New this year is the Worker Files link, which takes you to a comprehensive list of employee documents that have been distributed and signed or are expiring, such as the Employee Handbook, W-4s and I-9s, Offer Letters, and the Noncompete Policy. These are arranged by employee and encased in big colorful boxes. The files are searchable, and they’re also available in each employee and contractor’s record.

The third link takes you to the payroll section. OnPay divides this process into four sequential steps; you click on each of the colored tabs at the top of the screen to move on to the next. The fourth link opens your list of reports. These are split between payroll and benefits. You can customize each with multiple filters, display them directly on the screen, and open them in Excel or save them as PDF files. The Payroll Listing report now allows significantly more customization. You can add up to 40 items by dragging and dropping them into position among the standard columns included. This is the most powerful reporting tool I’ve seen in the payroll sites I’ve reviewed. 

The fifth link takes you to your payroll filings and payments, and the sixth to HR tools and data. OnPay has really beefed up its HR management capabilities to the point where it leads payroll websites in that area. In fact, its abilities make it competitive with more-advanced HR-and-payroll solutions. HR has its own dashboard that can include onboarding and personnel tasks, pending employee offers, and time-off information. You can’t see some of the site’s HR capabilities just by browsing through the screens, but there’s a lot there. For example, the expanded document library contains hundreds of HR guides, contracts, and customizable templates. You can easily assign tasks and create custom workflows.

The Employee Time Off screen displays information about who’s out of the office now and who will be soon; you can also view this in a graphical calendar. Below that is a table with an entry for each employee that shows requested time off (which you can approve or deny) and those requests in process, as well as a history. OnPay offers online conversations between employees and the administrator to take care of this personnel element. The site has added this communications ability in other areas of the site, and it’s a terrific, useful feature.

The seventh link in the toolbar takes you to the Company menu, which contains much of what used to be on the Settings menu. Here, you can access links to tasks like setting up pay items, deductions, locations, departments, positions, and accrual policies. 

Finally, there is a link to COVID-19 assistance. Most payroll websites have become critical resources for businesses during the pandemic, because of all the ways payroll is affected. OnPay provides the two reports needed for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP): Average Monthly Payroll Cost Report and Payroll Costs Report for PPP Loan Forgiveness. OnPay can modify your payroll if you indicate that you’re eligible for the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the Employee Retention Credit (ERC), and the Social Security tax deferral program. The site also provides a guide to resources for the ways your small business may be affected by COVID-19 legislation. 

Using the OnPay Dashboard

OnPay always opens to your main dashboard, and you can return to it from the toolbar. This critical feature has been revamped since my last review. Links to your employee and contractor screens appear at the top of the screen. If there are alerts or tasks that need attention, you’ll see them displayed there, too.

As I mentioned before, OnPay has a tendency to sprawl, and to incorporate what I consider excessive white space. This occurs on the dashboard screen. There are four big tiles that contain links to your most recent pay runs, your next scheduled pay run, important dates, and open employee offers. You can customize these and turn off ones you don’t want, but if everything is showing, you have to scroll down to see it all.  The content displayed there is great; it would just be nice to see links to all of the data and tasks in one view. 

Running Your Payroll With OnPay

OnPay handles payroll runs much as its competitors do. You select the employees you want to pay from the list that appears on the first screen of this four-step wizard (each step is represented by a colored tile). The page also displays related information at the top, like period start and end and check date. Click the next tile, and you’ll be able to enter the hours worked for each pay type (if any have changed since the last pay run), including PTO. I hadn’t yet approved several time-off requests for the pay period, so OnPay displayed them and allowed me to dispatch them before I got to the Enter Hours screen.

The Enter Hours screen is quite flexible. You can click on workers’ names to open their records for reference or editing; add, reorder, or remove pay items; and add or override existing numbers. You can also set up new custom pay types. An unmarked link below each worker’s pay totals opens a small window within that same screen where you can do all of your payroll editing. It would be helpful if this link were descriptive; new users might not know about the ability to modify payroll here.

After some rapid, automatic calculating, OnPay moves to the payroll review page, which displays each employee’s gross wages, withholding taxes, employer taxes, and deductions. It also displays warnings about anything that’s gone awry with your run so that you can fix it. The final page here tells you how much will be deducted from your company checking account and when. Click Approve Payroll, and you’re done, aside from downloading and printing any checks if necessary. OnPay takes care of calculating and submitting all required payroll taxes—something competitors also do.

Mobile and Employee Access, Support

OnPay doesn’t offer a separate mobile app, but rather allows access through a mobile browser by using responsive website design. Navigation is easy: The toolbar is always available by clicking a link at the top of the screen. Both Android and iOS smartphone versions replicate the desktop experience capably (with some exceptions), though, understandably, some parts of the screen that display horizontally on the desktop display vertically on mobile devices. But I expect to do a lot of scrolling on a smartphone for an application as complex and data heavy as payroll.

These mobile versions are much improved since my last review. I ran into a lot of problems with data display and payroll runs last year, but most of them have been resolved. Some of the text is small enough that it’s a little hard to read—especially in lengthy lists and reports—but double-clicking on the data makes it perfectly readable. On some screens on the Android version, however, the text was simply too light to read. And not all of the desktop functionality has moved over to the mobile version yet; it’s still missing, for example, many reports and payroll tax information.

Like the competition, OnPay supports employee portals. Workers can sign into a separate site to see their current and historical payroll data; access employee documents; modify personal information; and communicate with the payroll administrator about time-off requests. These are lifetime accounts—employees can access them even after they’ve left the company. All the services I reviewed offer employee portals; Patriot Software’s are especially good.

OnPay offers free phone, chat, and email help Monday through Friday, and has added urgent email support on the weekend. Its online help resources continue to improve. Besides offering much more guidance, they include tax information for all 50 states.

Expanded, Improved, and Excellent

OnPay has put a lot of effort into expanding its HR tools, data, and tracking since my last review, but it hasn’t ignored its payroll element nor its mobile access. It does everything a payroll website should do, and it does it, for the most part, simply and well. Pricing is transparent, with no extra fees except for adding employees. It’s quite affordable for small businesses. Despite that, its worker capacity and back-end accounting connections and processing are better than most. Its ability to run unlimited payrolls—and to easily support up to 100 employees and more—should make it appeal to a more advanced range of small businesses than its competitors.

Because of all that, OnPay wins its first PCMag Editors’ Choice this year. Gusto is also an Editors’ Choice, because its user experience is excellent and it feels like a cohesive, well-structured system that excels at both payroll and HR, especially for growing businesses that need an upgrade path.

For more reviews of financial services for yourself and your small business, take a look at our roundups of the best online accounting services and tax software.

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Further Reading