Payroll Relief

Everything about Payroll Relief is built on the premise that the accounting firm, not the software vendor, should own the payroll client. AccountantsWorld has argued since 2003 that the large payroll companies took that relationship away from accountants, and this product is the counter-argument in software form. The firm licenses the platform, processes client payrolls itself, and sets its own fees with no reference to what the vendor charges. Nothing here is a referral and nothing is client-billed. Whatever the practice invoices above its licence cost is margin it keeps in full.

The processing model is the part no self-serve product matches. Payroll data is entered or imported, then payrolls are approved and processed in batches rather than one client at a time, and at year end checks, W-2s and 1099s print in batches too. Direct deposits, tax payments, tax filings and child support disbursements happen automatically once a run is approved, across all 50 states and most local jurisdictions, for clients of up to 1,000 employees. A separate After-The-Fact Payroll module handles the other half of a write-up practice, taking a payroll register entered from check stubs, computing FICA and net pay, and producing 940, 941, 943, 944, 945, W-2, W-3 and 1099 filings electronically. Employees get a self-service portal for pay statements and year-end forms, which removes a meaningful volume of phone calls from the firm's front desk.

That machinery is genuinely good and the maintenance around it is not. AccountantsWorld's blog stops in March 2023. Its webinars page lists nothing more recent than December 2020. Pricing appears nowhere on the site, so a firm cannot model the economics without a sales call, and standard paths such as a pricing page or a features page return 404s. The company's own story page still describes it as independent and makes no mention of IRIS Software Group, which now appears only in the support desk email address on the contact page. Support runs 9am to 7pm Eastern from New York. The user interface reflects its age, and firms migrating from it usually cite that first.

Accounting CS Payroll from Thomson Reuters is the closest structural competitor and the more common choice in firms already running UltraTax or Practice CS, though it is priced and sold like enterprise software. SurePayroll for Accountants covers similar ground with a lighter touch and Paychex behind it, but the firm hands over tax filing responsibility. OnPay and Patriot both let a firm bill clients at a markup, and both are more pleasant to use, but neither batches payrolls across clients and neither has an after-the-fact module.

The dated tier holds and the evidence is unusually clear for once. This is not a judgement on the processing engine, which still does something the modern products do not, but on the investment behind it. A vendor whose last blog post is three years old, whose webinar programme ended in 2020, and whose ownership change is visible only in a helpdesk email address is not a vendor to build a new payroll department on. Firms already running it and processing well should stay. Firms choosing today should weigh Accounting CS Payroll first.