SurePayroll, now in its 20th year, has long been competent at creating and managing employee records, processing payroll runs, handling related taxes, and keeping small businesses abreast of their obligations. Since we last reviewed the service, SurePayroll’s biggest news is the addition of a less expensive version. It’s also made tweaks in areas like onboarding, navigation, help, and, of course, COVID-19 resources. A few years ago the service was acquired by Paychex, which continues to support many of its efforts, including compliance.
Although SurePayroll’s flexibility is very good and its user interface polished and professional, it still lacks some of the usability and HR support that our two Editors’ Choices, Gusto and OnPay, offer. Both excel at making the complex simple, and they provide a more state-of-the-art user experience.
SurePayroll Pricing and Plans
SurePayroll has introduced a two-tier subscription service. SurePayroll Full Service is the same product we’ve reviewed in years past. It’s $29.99 per month, plus $5 per employee per month. There are a number of other fees you might end up paying, though, like the charge for creating and distributing W-2s and 1099s (competitors offer those forms for free, and they can really add up in SurePayroll). There are others, such as a charge for accounting integration.
The new SurePayroll Self Service is $19.99 per month plus $4 per month per employee. This includes everything in Full Service, but you’ll have to submit your own payroll taxes and filings (SurePayroll still calculates them). This is done for you automatically in the Full Service version. There are no HR tools in Self Service like there are in Full Service, but SurePayroll doesn’t offer nearly as much in this area as OnPay does. If you want the two-day payroll processing offered by Full Service instead of the standard four-day, you’ll have to pay $7.99 per month.
Only Patriot Software, with its Basic offering ($10 per month plus $4 per employee per month), is less expensive. It, too, requires you to submit your own payroll taxes. You’ll pay the most for Editors’ Choice Gusto’s Concierge level ($149 per month plus $12 per employee per month). Even its entry-level Core plan costs more, at $39 per month, plus $6 per employee per month.
Getting Started With Surepayroll
Every payroll service we’ve reviewed recently does an excellent job of getting you set up for paying your employees. All provide human help in addition to step-by-step walkthroughs within the application. This stage of the overall payroll process is excruciatingly detailed, no matter what service you choose. And you have to get it 100 percent right.
Last year, SurePayroll introduced a new enrollment process, as well as a free trial. It wasn’t quite finished at the time I reviewed it then, but it is now, and it’s excellent. It uses a step-by-step wizard to walk you through the required steps.
Once you’ve set up your login with SurePayroll, the site takes you to its central setup hub, which is divided into five sections. You will have already provided the information required when you click the About You tab (name, email, and phone), but you can edit it if necessary. Click on the next tab, labeled Company Information, to supply your legal name, company type, and so on. Then you can establish your payroll schedule (SurePayroll is especially flexible here) and first pay cycle.
On the next screen, you indicate whether or not you’ve paid employees already in your current business. If you have, you need to provide your payroll history (employees, earnings, and deductions) for the current year. A SurePayroll representative will automatically contact you to assist if this is the case.
Next, you can add employee records (SurePayroll staff can also help you with this task). You add contact information, birthdate, and gender on the first screen in this four-part wizard. You can also indicate whether you want to allow the employee to edit his or her personal information and have access to paystubs, time off data, and W-2s on a mobile app.
An aside here: At any point in this wizard and others on the SurePayroll site, three navigation icons show in the lower-right corner of the screen. These let you go back, continue, or return to the Dashboard. Most sites don’t offer this much navigation flexibility, the lack of which can frustrate your efforts to enter data.
On the next screen, you provide the employee’s status (active, new hire, or terminated) and type (full-time, part-time, or 1099 contractor), along with his or her hire date. You can also enter the work location here. Pay type options appear on the next screen: hourly, salary, units, or mk,,,,,miles. I haven’t seen these latter two options on any other site.
After entering the regular rate and any overtime rate that applies, you indicate whether you want to pay the employee by printed check, direct deposit, or both. Finally, you supply his or her social security number and complete a series of queries about withholding by clicking buttons, selecting from drop-down lists, or entering data. This includes the type of W-4 (there’s a new one that must be used for 2020 hires), filing status, and federal and state withholding tax details.
The next step in setup involves entering information about federal and state taxes. If you’ve paid employees before, you should have the information requested at hand. If not, you’ll have to do some research to provide the data needed. SurePayroll can help with this. Finally, you provide the numbers for your payroll bank account, which SurePayroll verifies.
The site’s setup tool allows you to continue through the entire wizard even if you’re missing a piece of information. When this occurs, you’ll see a Fix Issues button as you’re returned to the Dashboard post-wizard. Click this button, and a screen opens listing all of the missing data. Click on the small wrench icon at the end of each line, and you’re taken back to the relevant page so that you can add the information. You keep clicking Fix Next Item until you’ve supplied all of the required data and can exit the setup tool. This setup review tool is unique to SurePayroll, and it’s very effective.
Getting Around
SurePayroll looks and works much like it did last year when I reviewed it. It has a serious, professional look (which is not a criticism; some might prefer this approach), compared with Gusto’s lighter, more state-of-the-art visuals. But overall, it’s a little easier to get the lay of the land on SurePayroll than it is on Gusto. Its menu-based navigation system points you in the right direction more skillfully.
SurePayroll opens to the Dashboard, which is one of the best in this group of sites. Information about your current payroll—the most critical data on the page—appears in the upper-left corner. Here you see the current pay period start, end, and check date; deadline (the most prominent date/time on the page); and a big orange button that says Continue (or Begin) Payroll. You can’t miss that.
Directly below that section is a summary of your most recent pay run (with previous ones in a drop-down list), including any outstanding action items. Other content includes reminders, a customizable chart that displays snapshots of payroll trends, and links to off-cycle activities, such as additional checks. This page is more informative than the dashboard in Square Payroll, for example.
This home screen displays five other tabs for the site’s main sections in a horizontal toolbar: Payroll, Reports, Employees, Company, and Resources (such as reminder preferences, enrollment forms, and year-end info). Click on one, and a drop-down menu displays all the tasks for the section. That’s the only global navigation tool; everything else is handled within the working screens.
Those screens use a combination of blank fields, drop-down lists, multiple-choice buttons, interactive bars, and hyperlinks for data entry and navigation. When you’re entering employee information, for example, a vertical pane on the left displays the multiple types of information you need to enter for each worker, including Bank, Taxes, and Deductions. Click on one, and the right side of the screen changes to reflect your options. The Employment tab opens the most complex, detail-heavy screen. You complete fields and click buttons to provide a profile that contains information like Employee Type, Job Title, Hire Date, and Pay Type. When you’ve completed a section, a small icon next to its label will switch to Done.
Flexible Payroll
SurePayroll offers a level of flexibility not found in most competing services. It can handle the specialized needs of a variety of business types, including household, nonprofit, restaurant, and dental businesses. It also supports vertical industries such as transportation, agriculture, and healthcare settings. It integrates with more accounting applications than the competition, too. Besides QuickBooks and Xero, SurePayroll shares payroll information with sites like Kashoo and Sage 50. No competitor offers such flexibility; OnPay is probably the closest. QuickBooks Payroll only links to QuickBooks.
Assuming that you’ve entered every detail required during setup, the process of running a payroll should be simple. SurePayroll presents a screen divided horizontally into hourly employees, salaried employees, and 1099 contractors. Each staff member’s area contains four types of information. In the Earnings column for hourly employees, you enter the hours they worked at their regular pay rate, overtime, and so on, and any additional rates.
The other two categories of workers just contain regular hours, though you can add overtime and other types of hours. Clicking the down-arrow in the Select field of the Other Compensation column opens a list of additional types of pay that might need to be included in the current check (bonus, commission, or reimbursement, for example), along with the option to create others.
In the More column, you can enter any vacation or sick hours taken and add any one-time deductions, in addition to those you’ve already defined. If you created departments during setup, you can assign wages and hours to them. Each of these three items has a small pencil icon next to it. Clicking here lets you add time-off hours, for example, and even create departments and deductions on the fly during processing, as you can with OnPay. The fourth column displays each worker’s gross wages.
The Default Payroll screen is new. If your payroll remains the same from cycle to cycle, SurePayroll can fill in the values automatically, but you still have to process it. You might want to set this up for only some of your employees, like those on salary. Of course, you can change these values whenever necessary. You can also set it up to run automatically. Other services, like Gusto, offer automatic payroll as well.
The Big Picture
Scroll down to the bottom of the screen when you’re done entering data, and you’ll see three options: Reset Payroll (clear what you’ve entered to start over), Save (most sites don’t offer this option, but Gusto does; you can save your work and come back later), and Preview Payroll. The numbers of checks paid and total gross wages are also displayed here.
The site’s preview page is one of the best I’ve seen. It tells you what amounts will be withdrawn from your bank account on the stated date, broken down into direct deposits, employee taxes, and employer taxes. It also lists any deferred taxes and additional fees (your monthly base and per-employee fee at the time that it’s billed). Unlike other services, SurePayroll charges at least $4.99 every payroll for accounting software integration.
This screen contains reminders of any employee checks that need to be printed in addition to the amounts due to benefits providers. When you scroll down, your list of employees appears in a table that contains the key numbers of that run. Click on one, and you can see the entire paystub. Totals for all disbursements appear at the bottom. You can only click on the Submit for Approval button after you check a box next to a statement saying that you understand that the specified amount of money will be withdrawn on a specific date for payroll and taxes, and that you want to approve the run. That’s a nice safety feature.
Once you approve the payroll run, SurePayroll calculates and submits your payroll taxes and tells you when you can expect direct deposits will be available to employees. Except for Workful, every other service I reviewed does the same. It also prepares the reports that must be filed with the IRS and other taxing agencies periodically.
SurePayroll offers an expedited pay option. If you miss a cutoff date, for example, and you meet certain criteria, you can have your run completed the same day or the next day (the standard waiting period is two days), though you must pay an additional fee. The site also lets you cancel a payroll run within a limited time window.
Reports and Mobile
SurePayroll offers the reports you’d expect to see on a small business payroll website, and it offers more than even Gusto does. Many of these are payroll reports that display detailed output about payroll over a variety of date ranges, along with reports that deal with deductions and with required COVID-19 content. There are also employee and employee benefit-centric reports, and others focus on departments and accounting integration. Some of SurePayroll’s reports offer display and export options that are better than Gusto’s: PDF, Excel, Rich Text, and Printer-Friendly.
Surepayroll offers both an iPhone app and an Android app. While they don’t replicate the desktop experience as comprehensively as some competitors’ do, they do let you edit and run a payroll remotely. There’s an abbreviated Dashboard, partial employee records, and a payroll report in addition to the processing tools.
A Sure Choice
SurePayroll has been a trusted DIY payroll service for many years. It’s an excellent choice for very small businesses (because of its reasonable pricing—extra fees aside) and larger companies (because of its flexibility and customizability) alike. It would be a good option for any company that needs time clock integration, since it can connect to any of about two dozen applications (with a $4.99 fee per payroll processed). It also offers good customer support (including Saturdays) and excellent employee tracking. It’s especially appropriate if you’re running one of the types of businesses for which it offers special features and support, such as a restaurant or a dentist’s office, or simply your own household. But its flexibility makes it a very effective tool for many kinds of small businesses.
Our first payroll service Editors’ Choice, Gusto, is tops when it comes to user interface and navigation, and it covers the basics of payroll without adding a lot of complexity that many small businesses don’t need. OnPay, our other Editors’ Choice, is equally capable in terms of both payroll and HR. It supports several vertical industries and usability is even better this year.
While you’re thinking about your bottom line, you should also check out our roundups of the best online accounting services and tax software.
SurePayroll Specs
| Mobile Admin App | Yes |
| Submits Federal, State, Local, and Payroll Taxes | Yes |
| W-2s | No |
| 1099s | No |
| Time Tracking | No |
| HR Add-Ons | Yes |
| Free Trial | Yes |
