Patriot is an online solution for handling both accounting and payroll tasks. It’s ideally suited to small business owners thanks in particular to its highly praised support, which can help provide ongoing help and also assist your business in configuring the system to work in the first place.
The company itself has been around for over three decades, so it clearly has plenty of experience on both the accounting and payroll fronts.
Patriot now counts 65,000+ customers on its books, having facilitated over $19 billion in payroll processing. It also boasts of an average time for customers to run payroll of less than three minutes – a testament to its ease of use.
- Want to try Patriot? Check out the website here
The real bonus with Patriot, however, is that it seems to have retained its original roots feel, with a keenness on providing a great level of customer service and support.
Adding to that ongoing appeal is Patriot’s easy-to-use design and a user interface that aims to provide business owners with an affordable accounting solution that’s reasonably stress-free too.
Patriot Accounting and Payroll: Plans and pricing
Patriot continues to offer consistent pricing across its product portfolio, which allows business owners to choose from the package that suits their needs the best.
Currently, there are two routes you can take – accounting or payroll software. Each has two different tiers.
Accounting Basic ($20/month) offers unlimited customers, invoices, vendors and payments, as well as income and expense tracking and more.
Accounting Premium ($30/month) adds support for estimates, recurring invoices, invoice reminders and receipt management, so it’s a much more rounded option for not a lot more.
The payroll service also offers affordable plans, starting with Basic Payroll ($17/month plus $4/worker), with unlimited payrolls, a free employee portal and other features.
Full Service Payroll ($37/month plus $5/worker) adds federal, state and local tax filing and some more filing tools.
If you want to add Time & Attendance tracking to either of these, it’s $6 per month plus $2 per employee on top of your bill. HR Software costs $6/month plus $6 per worker.
Although it could be perceived as a pain to have multiple add-ons, we’d much rather have the option of picking and choosing the exact parameters we need rather than paying through the roof for unrequired features.
Better still, Patriot regularly runs deals and has 30-day free trials. At the time of writing, there’s a 50% off for three months promotion.
Patriot Accounting and Payroll: Features
Despite its value appeal Patriot still comes armed with plenty of features, with some of the key options outlined below.
In terms of payroll processing, Patriot can handle both W-2 employees and 1099 contractors, with support for unlimited payroll runs per month. It’ll also help with federal, state and local tax filings.
When it comes to time and attendance, Patriot’s got you covered with an optional add-on for tracking hours, overtime etc and so on. HR teams can also add on compliance, employee files and permissions so that they can integrate a bit better with the finance department.
On the employee side, there’s a portal for accessing pay checks and updating personal information.
Integrations are pretty thin on the ground, but you can sync with QuickBooks for exporting payroll entries. This is probably because Patriot prefers you to use its own tools across the board rather than piecing together different software.
The whole system is mobile-friendly too, which makes it convenient for people on the go.
Users report that Patriot runs like a dream, which is hardly surprising given that the company has been plying its wares for so long. Given that the service handles a lot of data, particularly when it comes to employee details, Patriot also goes to great pains to remind us that security is its number one priority.
Data is encrypted, audited annually and the company also adheres to all federal privacy, anti-fraud and security laws.
Users tend to rate Patriot highly for its tax calculating tools, but note that while automatic updates to tax tables help reduce the chance of an error, multistate work could add further cost and complexity.
Patriot Accounting and Payroll: Ease of use
Setting up any accounting or payroll product for the first time can be daunting, so Patriot gains praise for its ability to get you started and keep things ticking over further down the line.
The company has done a great job in making improvements to the usability of the software, especially now that it has implemented a beefy setup wizard that can help new users get up and running faster.
If you’ve got employees to think about and want to be sure that information input into the system is correct and where it should be then this wizard is a real bonus.
Of course, setting things up is always going to be the hardest part of the process due to the need for adding employee data for the first time. However, Patriot has really come up trumps with the latest incarnation of its package.
Once you’re in, the dashboard feels easy to navigate as are the employee and contractor portals, which encourage some degree of self-service to take some of the pressure off HR teams.
There’s also a mobile app for employees to handle certain features, but naturally, it’s nowhere near as feature-packed as the desktop version, so admins are best off accessing Patriot in a more conventional manner.
Because the platform focuses on the essentials rather than a whole plethora of finance and HR-related tools, it’s pretty easy to get your head around. That, of course, comes as the cost of some lost functionality, but you’ll only really notice this if your business has pretty demanding needs.
Patriot Accounting and Payroll: Support
The level of support that comes with the Patriot experience is what seems to drive many of its customers to keep using the online accounting and payroll service.
Knowing that you’ve got people who can talk you through the various processes, features and functions is a valuable asset and Patriot consistently secures positive results on this front.
It’s pretty easy to get in contact with the US-based team by phone, email or live chat, which is generally more than can be said about most of its rivals.
Many companies operate a ticket-based system, where users must file tickets and then wait for support, which is frustrating to say the least.
Free setup help is provided via the onboarding process, and there’s also plenty of documentation and tutorials on the knowledge base side of things.
It’s worth mentioning that, since Patriot is US-centered, customers operating outside of the US may struggle with support.
Patriot Accounting and Payroll: Final verdict
Patriot is an excellent software option for business users searching for a duo of solutions on the accounting and payroll front.
The company has had a long time to perfect its formula, and while it continues to make improvements including within the user interface, the core tools inside this package come very recommended.
We found the pricing to be very competitive, especially for small businesses, and for those customers it does most of the basics very well.
In addition, having team members on hand to smooth the transition into using it makes Patriot very appealing.
Overall then, this is an accounting and payroll package that should be investigated, especially if you're looking for the extra benefit of that hands-on, real-time support.
If you need multistate support, things get pricier, and international customers are poorly catered-for, so in these cases, it could be worth considering a different HR platform.
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