David H. Ringstrom - QuickBooks Online For Dummies

The sale and regular prices shown in Table 2-2are monthly subscription prices. The sale price is typically good for three months.

At the time I wrote this chapter, Intuit allowed Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced users to add full-service payroll for the sale prices of $22.50 per month plus $4 per employee per month, Payroll Premium for $37.50 per month plus $8 per employee per month, or Payroll Elite for $62.50 per month plus $10 per employee per month. Full-service means that Intuit handles your payroll tax deposits and payroll tax returns for you.

Payroll charges are billed monthly as part of your QuickBooks subscription. You can test-drive payroll processing at no charge for up to 30 days. After that period, your overall subscription fee increases to include payroll. Conversely, QuickBooks Payments feature, which allows you to accept online payments from your customers, doesn’t have a monthly fee; you’ll pay per transaction instead. As of this writing, the rates are 2.4 percent for swiped credit card transactions, 2.9 percent for e-invoiced transactions, and 3.4 percent for key-entered transactions, plus a 25-cent fee per transaction. Automated Clearing House (ACH) transactions incur a 1 percent fee up to a maximum of $10.

As I write this chapter, QuickBooks is rolling out an additional subscription-based feature called QuickBooks Commerce, which is designed to make it easy to place and sell your inventory products on a variety of major online shopping platforms. You can bet that additional premium offerings will become available in QuickBooks as time goes on.

You have to choose between a 30-day free trial and the 3-month sale price, although Intuit sometimes offers the sale price to trial users. If you’re offered this deal, be prepare to act on it immediately because the offer won’t be repeated. Or you can start your full-price subscription immediately by choosing Buy Now. You can cancel your subscription at any time, but the service is billed in monthly periods with no refunds or prorations.

Accounting professionals can use QuickBooks Online Accounting for free and also sign up for the Wholesale Pricing program, which offers you discounted pricing on QBO subscriptions for companies that you create or manage. Your credit card is charged each month for all the subscription fees, and you can pass along the discounted price to your clients or charge the market rate. As discussed in Chapter 12, Intuit will send you a single consolidated bill for all the QBO subscriptions you manage.

The 30-day free trial isn’t available if an accounting professional creates a company through QBOA because a payment method must be provided when the company is created.

If your client initially sets up their own QBO subscription, you can move it to your consolidated bill at the discounted wholesale rate. If your arrangement with your client doesn’t work out, you can remove the client from your consolidated bill, which means that the client will resume paying for their own subscription.

When you establish your QBO subscription, you can choose add-on payroll from the start or elect to incorporate payroll later from the Employees screen (see Figure 2-1). Alternatively, your accountant can enable payroll on your behalf by way of QBOA. In the past, QuickBooks offered self-service versus full-service plans, but now all plans are full-service, meaning that QBO will handle your payroll tax deposits and payroll tax returns. If you opt in to QBO Payroll, you can’t complete those tasks your own even if you want to. But who would want to?

FIGURE 2-1:If you sign up for QBO on your own, you can turn on Payroll from the Employees screen.

All QBO Payroll services include the following features:

Paying employees with printed checks or by direct deposit

Calculating tax payments automatically and paying them electronically

Processing federal and state quarterly and annual reports, and preparing W-2 forms

Processing payroll for employees who work in your company’s state or another state

Keeping payroll tax tables up to date without having to install updates (as you do with the QuickBooks Desktop product)

Using the QBO Payroll mobile app to pay employees, view past paychecks, file tax forms electronically, and pay taxes electronically

When you establish QBO Payroll, you must connect your bank account and provide your tax identification numbers. Make sure that you’re ready to start processing payroll immediately before you embark on a QBO Payroll subscription. If you’d like to try before you buy, use the online test drives I mention earlier for QBO Plus and QBO Advanced.

Yes, you can migrate your accounting records from QuickBooks Desktop to QBO, as I discuss in Chapter 13. This process won’t affect your original desktop company; it’s still available via the desktop product. After you import your data into QBO, you should run the Profit & Loss report and the Balance Sheet, using the accrual method for all dates from both QBO and QuickBooks Desktop, to ensure that both versions show the same information.

If you want to keep one foot on the ground while you reach for the cloud, you can run QuickBooks Desktop and QBO in parallel for a brief period. Doing so does require double work because you’ll have to enter your transactions in both platforms. Then you’ll be able to run reports from both platforms to confirm that you’re seeing the same results in both places. Plan carefully if you opt to run parallel; things can quickly turn confusing if you’re not disciplined about the process.

You should discontinue using QuickBooks Desktop when you make the switch to QBO, except for running reports and viewing historical data. No synchronization occurs between QuickBooks Desktop and QBO; the transfer that you perform from QuickBooks Desktop to QBO is one-time and one-way.

It’s very likely that you’ll have accounting needs that aren’t met by a base subscription for QBO. As I discussed earlier, for example, payroll is an add-on that entails additional monthly costs. The Intuit Payments app, which supports electronic customer payment processing and integrates with QBO, doesn’t have a monthly cost, but it does have per-transaction fees.