If you have employees to pay, a few pieces need to be ready before your first payroll run. AccountEdge handles the payroll itself — calculating pay, taxes, and deductions. Depending on how you pay your employees and how you file your forms, one or two additional services may apply to you:
To calculate and run payroll, you need the payroll add-on ($20/month for unlimited employees). It's available on all AccountEdge plans and keeps your federal, state/provincial, and local tax tables current.
To deposit pay straight into your employees' bank accounts, you'll also want direct deposit. It runs through a merchant account, and the application takes some time to approve — so if you want it working by your first payday, start the application now.
To e-file your forms — W-2s, 940/941s, T4s — the Payroll Forms Service handles it. It's a separate annual service you can add anytime from your My Account page. If you file quarterly forms like the 941, you'll want it before your first quarter-end.
You can add payroll and any other services through your My Account page — Purchasing AccountEdge Add Ons walks through the steps.
Starting your setup
Once payroll is on your subscription, Setting Up Payroll for the First Time walks you through it in order — enrolling, country setup, tax tables, your employees, and your first run. US and Canadian payroll each have their own setup guide. Everything beyond setup — running payroll, benefits, filing, state and provincial requirements — lives in the Payroll collection.
You don't need your whole company setup finished before starting payroll. You do need your accounts list and your employee cards in place first — payroll builds on them, and both are early steps in Setting Up AccountEdge — In the Right Order. Once those exist, payroll setup can run alongside everything else. If you have a payday deadline, work backward from it: tax tables and direct deposit approval are the two steps with wait time built in.