QuickBooks Payroll Premium

Most firm-billed client payroll inside a QuickBooks practice ends up on Premium, and the reason is the middle two features rather than the top ones. Same-day direct deposit means a Monday afternoon approval still funds Tuesday, which removes the standing argument about cut-off times. Time tracking in the Workforce app, with schedules built by job or by shift, keeps hours inside the same system that will pay them, so nobody rekeys a spreadsheet. Around that sits full-service tax work, with Intuit calculating, filing and paying federal, state and local payroll taxes, e-filing 1099s for unlimited contractors, and running auto payroll for salaried staff on direct deposit. Premium reviews the setup after the firm builds it. HR content comes from Mineral as a resource center and handbook builder, plus recruiting, automated I-9, time off tracking and five customizable workflows.

The partner decision matters more than the feature list. Firm-billed subscriptions carry the ProAdvisor discount at 30 percent off the base ongoing, which Intuit calls its only ongoing discount, and arrive as one monthly invoice covering every client. Client-billed at the direct discount gives the client 30 percent off for twelve months and then list price. Revenue share pays the firm 30 percent of base and 15 percent of per-employee fees for twelve months, but the subscription must be client-billed and cannot be paid by the firm, and revenue share is unavailable when moving an existing subscription across to client billing. Firm-billed Premium works out at $61.50 plus $11.05 per employee against list of $88 plus $13, and note that the head fee is discounted 15 percent, not 30, so wholesale margin narrows as headcount grows. Split billing, added in 2024, lets a firm carry the ledger and hand the client the payroll bill.

The gap for a firm is batch processing. QuickBooks Online Accountant gives a client list, not a payroll console: there is no cross-client pay run, no after-the-fact payroll entry, no single screen showing which of sixty clients are approved for Thursday. Firms with heavy payroll volume drive that from a spreadsheet and a browser tab per client, which is exactly the workflow Payroll Relief and Accounting CS Payroll were built to remove. Premium also carries the standard accuracy guarantee rather than Elite's $25,000 penalty cover, so a firm that wants that protection is paying for HR modules it did not want in order to get it.

Core is the honest comparison downward. It drops to next-day deposit and has no time tracking or HR workflows, and for a three-person S corp on fixed salaries that is enough. Upward, Elite buys done-for-you setup and a named HR advisor. Outside the family, Gusto and OnPay both publish flat pricing with year-end forms included and sync cleanly to QBO, and they win when the client is not otherwise tied to Intuit. Premium wins when the client already lives in QuickBooks Online and the firm wants one vendor, one invoice and no mapping to maintain.

The tier moved up from dated. The evidence is a current product line, a payroll AI that gathers time data and flags inconsistent hours, and billing options Intuit expanded rather than froze.