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). Payroll is an add-on to an AccountEdge subscription, so it can't be purchased on its own. 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 — the Payroll Forms Service handles it. It's a separate annual service, available for US customers, that 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.