Cloud-based payroll software provider OnPay has launched a Partner Program for accountants and bookkeepers.
The program includes special pricing for accountants, along with a client dashboard and other features to help them better serve and manage their clients. It also lets them decide whether to bill clients for payroll themselves, or have OnPay bill them directly, while providing a piece of that revenue to the accounting partner.
“We’ve been working with accountants since the beginning,” CEO and founder Jesse Burgess told Accounting Today. “Our third customer that ever called in was actually an accounting firm, and they said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a couple of clients that this solution would make sense for.' So accountants have been a part of our story the whole time. We’re just launching a more intentional approach to working with accountants and trying to position ourselves where we can bring value to their practice, especially with the rise of what people might call digital accounting firms or tech-enabled accounting firms — we really feel like we fit into their technology stack really well, and how they’re positioning themselves and marketing themselves.”
Besides access to the company’s full-service payroll solution, which can serve clients with up to 1,000 employees, the OnPay Partner Program provides:
- A client dashboard where accountants and bookkeepers can manage all their clients, assigning tasks, tracking payroll deadlines, pulling reports and managing software app integrations.
- Special benefits and pricing for accountants and bookkeepers, with pricing at $36 per business and $4 for each active employee.
- Automatic synchronization with QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop and Xero.
- Six levels of permission so practitioners can customize the degree of payroll collaboration between themselves and their clients.
- Integrated HR, workers’ compensation and benefits in all 50 states.
Delivering payroll services helps accountants get closer to their clients, according to OnPay president and chief operating officer Mark McKee. “Instead of being involved with their client once a quarter or a couple of times a quarter or maybe once a year, now they can be involved with this customer on even a weekly basis,” he said. “Because they facilitated that relationship, now they get to be top of mind with that end user on a weekly basis, which is a great opportunity.”
The flexibility of the program, and particularly the permissioning features, help accountants manage their clients and their staff better, he continued.
“Each firm is different in how they approach payroll,” he said. “We see a lot of accountants who say, ‘I run the pay runs for the client from start to finish, and they don’t want to have to worry about it,’ and then we have some who are working with their clients as needed and as a consultant and advising them, and that’s when they can pull the reports they need, and the six permission levels let them do that. We had a conversation with an accounting firm that has so many clients that any given set of people of the firm don’t need to see this set of clients over here; they only need to see the ones they’re working with. The six levels let them set permissions on who is in which account and who has access to each specific client.”
OnPay has approximately 10,000 employer-users, and processes roughly $2 billion payroll annually. Its largest customer has over 800 employees, according to McKee, but its average client has between 10 and 15 – and the company aims to serve just about every industry well.
“We were challenged early on to figure out a solution that worked for the majority of companies that were picking up the phone and calling us,” he said. “That’s one of our differentiators – we can do really any industry. We can do a 943 filing for a farm, and 10 percent of our client base is health care practices; we can do tips, clergy and nonprofits, and do it well.”
