OnPay

Few payroll vendors let a firm choose how the money flows, and that is the part of OnPay worth studying first. A partner picks firm-billed or client-billed, then picks whether to take the benefit as a pass-through discount to the client or as revenue share retained by the practice. Under firm billing the practice pays OnPay at $49 a month plus $6 per worker, invoices the client at whatever it charges, and keeps the difference. Under client billing OnPay collects from the client and pays the firm 10, 15 or 20 percent depending on how many clients the firm has placed. The tiers run Member at one or two clients, Preferred at three to nineteen, Advanced at twenty to forty-nine and Elite at fifty or more, and every tier includes free payroll for the firm's own staff and free client setup.

Day to day the accountant dashboard lists every client account with permission levels that let a firm keep control of tax settings while handing hour entry to the client's office manager, or run the whole thing itself. Payroll posts back to QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop or Xero with GL mapping at employee-level detail after each run. Multi-state clients are the quiet strength: OnPay files in as many states as a client operates in and charges nothing extra for it, which matters when a 12-person client hires two remote employees in different states and a competitor would add a filing fee per state per month.

The gap is that OnPay assumes each client is a live payroll, not a write-up file. There is no after-the-fact payroll module for reconstructing a quarter from a shoebox of check stubs, and OnPay's own accountant materials do not describe a batch process that approves fifteen clients' payrolls in one pass. A firm processing sixty payrolls a week still opens sixty client accounts. Practices built on high-volume compliance processing should look at Payroll Relief or Accounting CS Payroll instead. Support is business hours by phone, chat and email, not the always-on model some clients now expect, and the HR module is a thin $15 plus $2 per worker add-on rather than a real HRIS.

Gusto is the direct comparison and beats OnPay on employee experience, benefits breadth and app ecosystem. OnPay wins on price predictability at scale, since Gusto's per-employee cost climbs faster and its partner program leans on discounts rather than a retained share. Patriot Payroll is cheaper still, at $37 plus $5 for full service, but charges $12 per additional state and integrates only with QuickBooks Online.

Top pick is the right placement and the evidence supports it. Pricing is published to the dollar, a SOC 2 Type 2 report is in place with mandatory MFA and role-based access on internal systems, migration is done by OnPay staff at no charge, and the partner economics are the most flexible in this category for a firm that wants payroll to be a billed service rather than a referral commission.