QuickBooks Payroll Core

Core is the entry tier of Intuit's payroll line and now appears in Intuit's own accountant materials under the name Workforce Payroll, part of a wider rebrand of the Core, Premium and Elite ladder. At the ProAdvisor rate it lists at $35 a month plus $5.95 per employee, which is the price after the standing 30 percent discount rather than retail. What it buys is full-service payroll: federal, state and local taxes calculated, filed and paid, Auto Payroll that runs salaried staff on unchanged pay without anyone touching it, 1099 e-filing, next-day direct deposit and an employee portal. The single real advantage over every competitor is that there is no integration. Payroll lands in the QuickBooks Online ledger because it is the same product, so there is no sync to monitor, no mapping to maintain and nothing to reconcile when a pay run fails to post.

Intuit gives firms three ways to handle the money and this is where the buying decision sits. Under the ProAdvisor wholesale discount the firm is billed, keeps the 30 percent off for as long as the subscription lives, and invoices the client at whatever it charges. Under the direct discount the client is billed and gets 30 percent off for twelve months, after which the price steps up to list. Under revenue share the client is billed, gets 50 percent off for three months, and the firm receives 30 percent of the subscription price annually. Intuit has also added split billing so a firm and client can divide the subscription. Only the first of those gives the practice a durable spread, and only the first survives the promotional period intact.

Core's limits are real and they are mostly about what the next tier up holds back. Direct deposit is next-day, not same-day, so a firm cannot fix a Thursday payroll error on Friday morning. Support is weekdays only, 6am to 6pm Pacific. There is no time tracking, no hiring or onboarding tooling, no document centre and no HR workflows, all of which start at Premium. Tax penalty protection is Elite only, which means Core carries an accuracy guarantee but not the indemnity a firm might assume it has. And like every self-serve payroll product, Core has no batch processing across a client list and no after-the-fact payroll entry. Fifteen clients means fifteen logins, and a write-up client whose payroll already happened has to be handled somewhere else.

Gusto is the usual alternative and beats Core on employee experience, benefits administration and multi-state handling, at a higher per-employee cost and with a partner programme built on discounts rather than an ongoing wholesale rate. OnPay is cheaper at scale and pays revenue share. Neither, though, writes directly into a client's QuickBooks file, and for a firm whose entire book is on QuickBooks Online that difference decides most cases.

Strong option is where this belongs and the tier stays. Core is not the best payroll product in this category on any single feature, and the frequency of Intuit price increases is a standing irritation for firms that quoted a fixed fee. It earns the grade on distribution and on economics: the client is already in QuickBooks, the ProAdvisor discount is real and permanent, and the firm can bill the client and keep the difference.