Onpay

By Kathy Yakal

Onpay is the new kid on the block. Online for two and a half years, its parent company, Payroll Center Inc. (PCI) has been in the business of providing payroll services since 1982. Its competitors in my latest roundup of online payroll services have offered do-it-yourself online payroll applications for many more years, but are newer to the payroll industry itself. I picked Onpay for review because of its history, its payroll-processing tools, and its deceptively simple and clean user interface. At first glance, you wouldn't think it was complex as it is. It's a worthy competitor for these veterans of online DIY payroll in many ways.

But Onpay is deficient in two critical areas. Though it supports online, text, and phone support, there's a dearth of online help. Furthermore, the company has not yet produced a mobile application.

Complex Setup
Payroll demands more precision than practically any other computer application. It requires accuracy at every step of the setup process to ensure that your employees always receive the correct net and gross pay. In addition, you must deal with a variety of government taxing agencies, health insurance and other benefits providers and financial institutions. Once this core information is all in place properly, your actual payroll runs will rarely take more than a few minutes, depending on the number of employees and any special cases for that pay period.

Onpay offers both pre-signup online demos and extensive support during the setup process, as do its competitors. Once you're on your own, though, it's a little less convenient to access the help files than it is on competing sites. When you click the big orange Help button to the right, you simply see a window that asks, "What is your question?" When you enter one (or just a word or phrase), the site returns a list of links to possible answers. When you click on one, you find out that there's something called a Knowledge Base that groups related questions and answers.

It would be nice to have a link that went directly to the Knowledge Base from the working screens (there's a separate URL for this)?one that provided an index to all help topics, such as Sure Payroll offers. It would also be helpful if the site was able to return its guess at the best answer (we were sent to some seemingly unrelated replies), with links to related topics, as Intuit Online Payroll Plus does.

Onpay, though, is quite responsive to individual questions. You can initiate a chat or fill out a support request. To do so, you must know your company's secret code to get an answer?a good extra layer of security, in addition to the multitier permissions system. Unlike the competition, Onpay offers no weekend support hours.

Building Data Files
Understandably, all three sites reviewed here require that you build your databases of company, employee and tax information before you run your first payroll. These three services are fairly comparable in terms of covering all of the necessary bases. Their setup screens display blank fields and choose-your-option lists that make it easy to create a comprehensive company record and individual records for each employee.

No one service is really the best here, though each has its own strengths. Intuit Online Payroll is in the process of rolling out the most graphically advanced interface available today. SurePayroll offers 12 custom fields for additional employee information (Intuit and Onpay include a box for notes). Onpay lets you upload an employee photo and define up to 13 additional pay types.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/dP91nPmYbAw/0,2817,2408107,00.asp

joepa sc primary bill moyers heidi klum and seal divorce craigslist killer extremely loud and incredibly close south carolina primary