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RecruitSurePayroll Review
SurePayroll Review Summary
Score 8 out of 10
Currency
LatAm and Remote Hires
Monthly fees
20%
Payment options
SWIFT/ACH
SurePayroll is a payroll service provider specializing in small businesses and household employers. It offers online payroll processing, tax filing, direct deposit, and compliance support to simplify payroll management.
SurePayroll Company Overview
As its name suggests, SurePayroll is a payroll processing service provider from the US. Founded in Illinois in 2000, the company has well over two decades of experience processing payroll for small business clients across the country.
In 2010, this provider was acquired by the much larger provider, Paychex, but kept its structure and specialization in small business payroll. Since then, the business has continued to grow under the Paychex umbrella. It has run over 29 million payrolls to date, works with tens of thousands of businesses, and has an annual turnover of over 75 million dollars.
As a service provider, SurePayroll works primarily with small US companies and even private household employers that want to outsource various HR functions. This provider offers payroll processing, outsourced HR services, and benefits administration for its clients. All of these services are focused around its online service platform.
The provider’s prices for some of its services are posted online for easy comparison with other providers. In this review, we’ll look into these prices, services, support, and other features to give SurePayroll a thorough assessment and help you decide whether or not to choose it as your payroll provider.
SurePayroll Key Features
SurePayroll began as a payroll service, and this continues to be its main focus today. At the same time, it has expanded into other areas and provides small businesses and even households with the tools they need to manage their human resources.
The key features of this provider include:
Payroll for Small Businesses
Above all, SurePayroll supports small businesses with anywhere from 1-100 employees who are responsible for calculating and paying their staff. Most small businesses struggle with payroll as this is a complicated function and one that’s very difficult to perform compliantly if you’re not an expert in the field. Businesses with very few staff typically can’t afford payroll professionals on their team and depend on their already overworked HR generalists to manage payroll as well. A software-as-a-solution (SaaS) product like Sure Payroll is a very good solution for businesses that find themselves in this situation.
With this product, you can input all of your employees’ information into the SurePayroll platform and set them up with automatic calculations that take into account their salaries, tax obligations, and deductions. Surprisingly, this platform doesn’t yet include its own time-tracking feature. You, therefore ,have two options to provide it with your time and attendance data. You can either enter it manually for each pay period or you can use an external time-tracking application that integrates with the SurePayroll platform. Such apps include StratusTime, FreshBooks, Buddy Punch, Homebase, Timesheets.com, UKG Ready, Virtual TimeClock, WebHR, Workforce Hub Timesheets & Attendance, Spring Ahead, and WebTimeClock.
With this data loaded into the platform, it can run your automatic calculations to find each employee’s gross salary for the period, withhold taxes, deduct mandatory benefits contributions, and arrive at their net salaries. You can easily review and approve the payroll each time, and then it will be processed. SurePayroll will pay your employees by direct deposit or allow you to print checks at any time if that’s what your employees prefer. Next, it will file federal, state, and local payroll taxes for you as long as you choose a package that includes this service. It will deduct and submit mandatory payments for Social Security, Medicare, FUTA (Federal Unemployment Tax Act), and SUI (State Unemployment Insurance). When this is complete, it also prepares W-2, 1099, 940, and 941 forms for you.
While you play a role in inputting data and checking the payroll, the platform’s automatic processes save you lots of time and ensure the accuracy of all of your numbers. Because all of this payroll information is saved on the cloud-based platform, you can also easily give your accountant secure, direct access to your payroll records for auditing purposes.
You can choose between two small business payroll plans. The No Tax Filing Plan costs just $20/month plus $4 for each employee or contractor on your payroll. If you want to include tax filing, you can choose the Full-service Payroll Plan for $29/month and an extra $7 for each employee. Both of these plans include free direct deposit services, unlimited payroll runs, and new-hire reporting for all of your employees.
Payroll for Nannies and Households
If you have a domestic worker who works privately for you, like a nanny, housekeeper, or live-in carer, you will have to manage their pay, taxes, and benefits. A SaaS product may be exactly what you need to help you with the process of paying your full-time, part-time, or seasonal workers. The SurePayroll platform helps you calculate your staff’s pay and withhold their federal, state, Medicare, and Social Security taxes correctly. It will pay your employees, submit their income taxes and benefits, and report to all relevant authorities on your behalf.
This service costs $39/month for one employee, and you can pay an extra $10/month for each additional employee you have.
Payroll for Accountants and Resellers
Accountants usually work with small businesses who struggle to manage their own payrolls. SurePayroll enables them to act as resellers by adding payroll to their list of services and managing their clients’ payrolls through the SurePayroll system. This platform already integrates with some of the most popular accounting software out there (Quickbooks Intuit, Sage, Xero, ZohoBooks, Less Accounting, FreshBooks, and AcountEdge).
These integrations make it simple to share data across apps. SurePayroll can rebrand its platform to match the accountancy’s brand, and when they bring clients on board, accountants receive healthy commissions from the fees their clients pay.
Benefits
In addition to payroll and mandatory tax and Social Security payments, SurePayroll also offers benefits administration services. This means that you can use this provider to offer 401(K) and health insurance plans to your employees and manage the details as well.
SurePayroll offers its own retirement savings plans, including traditional 401(K), safe harbor 401(K,) and simple IRA plans. You’re able to use it to design plans for employees that include pre-selected investments or choices from over 1600 options. While it claims competitive fees that are affordable for small businesses, SurePayroll doesn’t provide its fee structure for this service, and you’ll need to ask for a tailored quote to get this information.
Because SurePayroll is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Paychex, it’s connected to the Paychex Insurance Agency, which brokers health insurance for thousands of clients across the US. This helps you choose plans for your workers that are compliant with federal and state regulations. With a large range of insurance products available, prices are, once again, only available by request.
Worker’s Compensation and Other Insurance
SurePayroll offers a separate service for other types of insurance, SureProtect, that is also powered by the Paychex Insurance Agency. This service helps you select plans for mandatory worker’s compensation and includes other types of insurance that may be required in your state.
These include commercial property, commercial auto, business interruption, general liability, professional liability, and employment practices liability insurance. These options can all be purchased through SureProtect and administered in conjunction with your payroll.
SureHR
If you’re struggling to manage HR on your own, SurePayroll also provides an outsourced HR product called SureHR. The SureHR platform helps you manage onboarding, training, and performance evaluations.
You can also use it to build your employee handbook, policies and procedures, job descriptions, and e-learning courses for staff development. When changes to tax and employment laws are made, you also get alerts that might help you make appropriate changes to your own policies.
SureHR provides different services at different pricing tiers. Its basic Silver Plan is $25/month plus $5/employee. The Gold Plan is $45/month plus $8/employee and allows you to create dynamic employee handbooks and design custom e-learning courses. The Platinum Plan gives you full concierge service access to pre-built e-learning courses and on-demand support from HR professionals.
Platform
Like nearly all modern payroll service providers, SurePayroll manages its services through a secure cloud-based platform. When you sign up for a service plan, you receive a business profile with an easy dashboard that lets you manage your employees, payroll, HR and compliance, and reports. Because all data and calculations are handled automatically and stored in the cloud, you can easily access reports including:
- Payroll reports: payroll summary, year-to-date, cash requirements, check register, and deductions
- Employee reports: Pay stubs, employee details, new hires
- Employee benefits reports: benefits, worker’s compensation
- Annual and quarterly reports: W-2, 1099, W-3, 1096, 940, 941, and wage details
This platform is quite user-friendly and takes very little time to implement and learn to use effectively. It also integrates with top HR, accounting, and time-tracking software apps right out of the box to smooth data sharing and save you lots of time.
To make things even easier, the platform provides two separate apps for easy access on mobile devices (both iOS and Android). SurePayroll for Employers lets you easily review and approve payroll on the go. SurePayroll for Employees lets your workers access their paycheck information (pay, taxes, benefits) at any time.
Support
SurePayroll has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, which indicates a business that has a low number of complaints and honors its commitments well. This is reflected in its support services which are available via email, live chat, or phone.
However, they depend on the plan your business selects and you may not always be able to access payroll professionals, just customer service reps who can help you with basic platform features. However, the company’s service team is US-based for easier communications and can be contacted by phone and live chat from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. CT Monday to Friday, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. CT on Saturdays.
Resources
Like most competitors, SurePayroll offers a host of free resources to potential clients and more to plan subscribers. These include numerous articles on small businesses, nannies, household employee management, and payroll. You also get access to handy calculators for monthly and hourly employees, gross-up payroll, flexible spending accounts, and payroll taxes.
There’s a handy glossary of HR terms to help you navigate the industry and useful information for the tax and payroll rules for each state in the US.
SurePayroll Customer Reviews
The average scores (as of the time of writing) were:
- SurePayroll Capterra = 4.2/5 (297 reviews)
- SurePayroll G2 = 4.4/5 (523 reviews)
- SurePayroll Trustpilot = 4.0/5 (1,411 reviews)
- Surepayroll BBB = 4.32/5 (204 reviews)
SurePayroll Pros and Cons
All providers choose to offer different services and the way they provide them creates a unique set of strengths and weaknesses for their clients. SurePayroll’s pros and cons include:
- Pros
Fees posted online
While many competitors choose not to show their prices publicly, SurePayroll has most of its fees online. This makes it quick and easy to compare its service offerings to those of its competitors.
Low fees
This provider offers a powerful platform and quality services at relatively low prices. Users pay a monthly fee plus a charge for each employee on payroll, which is advantageous for small businesses with limited budgets.
Unlimited payroll runs
While other providers limit the number of payroll runs you can do per month, these are unlimited with this provider.
Quick turnaround
SurePayroll provides same-day and next-day payroll processing with two-day direct deposit payments, which helps ensure that your employees are paid promptly.
Mobile apps
SurePayroll offers two mobile apps, one for employers and one for employees, for convenient platform access from iOS and Android devices.
- Cons
Domestic only
If you run a team of workers that includes some people living in other countries, this provider doesn’t offer any tools to help you manage their payroll.
No time-tracking
While many competitors have built time-tracking features into their platforms, SurePayroll hasn’t and relies on its clients to enter data manually or use third-party time-tracking apps.
Limited support service
While this provider offers live support during business days and half-days on Saturdays, its clients may need support outside of these hours.
SurePayroll's Unique Selling Point
SurePayroll’s unique selling point is its nanny and household staff payroll offering. It recognizes the unique situation a lot of families are in with a single domestic worker on staff and provides a complete solution to help them manage their employees easily.
Remote People Score for SurePayroll
8/10
Our expert score for SurePayroll
Our team came to this score by considering the following components in the following weightings:
Talent Acquisition features
25%
RPO features
10%
HR features
10%
EOR features
10%
Platform features
10%
Pricing
20%
User reviews
15%
For each component, SurePayroll received the following score:
Talent Acquisition features
20/25
RPO features
8/10
HR features
8/10
EOR features
7/10
Platform features
7/10
Pricing
12/20
User reviews
12/15
Overall Assessment: SurePayroll
While other payroll providers aim at many different markets, SurePayroll has its sights on a specific type of client – small business owners and people with domestic staff in their homes. It simplifies the processes of paying, withholding taxes and deductions, and reporting so that these clients can focus on other areas of their business. It’s not a comprehensive solution that will work for larger businesses, but offering to manage payroll, HR, and benefits, for relatively low fees, is a very appropriate solution for small businesses across the US.
Frequently Asked Questions
Since both contractors and full-time employees require specific calculations and payments, this provider doesn’t distinguish between them. It charges the same for both types of employees and its fee per employee depends on the service plan you select.
No, not currently. This provider specializes in payroll for small businesses in the US and doesn’t currently manage payroll for organizations elsewhere.
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