What do you dislike about Square Payroll?
The interface is very wonky. All employees have to be entered into Square first, then "invited" to Square Payroll. Both processes were convoluted and confused the daylights out of the staff resulting in a lot of unnecessary administrative work on my end. Since Square, as a company, is super interested in referrals and wants everyone to buy a Square Reader, many employees thought they actually had to buy one. Thankfully no one did. The on-boarding process was easy to turn into a sign-up-for-Square process, which I confirmed when I sent myself an invite to an alternate email address. Once we got past that, it was all downhill from there.
We're a family farm with about 35-50 employees, most of whom are seasonal. We use Square to run both our farm stands and all our farmers' markets so Square Payroll seemed to make sense. Before we signed up, I asked numerous questions, including if they supported farms, including IRS 943 filing. I was told "yes, Square Payroll absolutely support farms.'" They do not, in fact, support farms. All farms are required to file IRS 943 for Agricultural Workers. Square Payroll only supports IRS 941. Unfortunately, we didn't catch that for 2 months - after we began enrolling the hourly employees. When I contacted them for clarification, I was told, by phone-based support, that 943 was "for household and domestic workers." Form 943 clearly states it is for Agricultural Workers right in the title of the form. No wonder they think they support farms, no one has ever looked at Form 943!
Initially, we tested only with a handful of salaried employees. Running payroll for salaried employees is an absolute mess. Everyone is converted to an hourly rate and then you enter how many hours the *salaried* staff member works. Which defeats the point of putting someone on salary. Additionally, we pay bi-monthly (on the 1st and 15th). No matter how long the pay period, you don't enter hours based on a 40-hour work week, which they do not tell you anywhere in the videos, documentation, or even several chats. You have to enter in 86.67 hours, which not having known that, meant I underpaid everyone for the first 2 paychecks.
When we started paying the hourly employees, the immediate annoyance was that I couldn't pre-enter hours for the next payroll run since there isn't a save function. This meant that for the employees who only work once a week at the farmers' markets, I couldn't enter their hours ahead of time. We have some employees who are paid by the day and others who are paid by the week (flat-rate). All of those people had to be entered just like the salaried people - so I had to remember who got paid 8 hours per day, who got paid 40 hours a week, and who got paid 20 hours a week (my boss is mostly to blame for this since this day-rate / weekly-rate apparently made sense when she was doing payroll by hand). This meant that each payroll run was way more time-consuming than necessary.
Having to enter every employee into Square first, then invite them into Square Payroll was a mess. But the biggest most confusing part of that was setting up permissions & permission groups for everyone. Square has basically decided every one of its customers is a restaurant or a commission-based retail outlet. Since we're neither, the permissions made zero sense, especially since only a handful of employees ever interact with Square. We immediately realized their time-tracking system wasn't going to work since it required everyone to clock in & out using Square. For those who don't work on the farm, they could use the Square Team app to do this but this was still a very confusing thing for a lot of the staff so we scrapped it since everyone is used to tracking their hours in 15-minute increments on an electronic timesheet at the end of the day so this was just an annoyance for most & incredibly confusing for others. It did make a mess of our Square system which, even after completely canceling Square Payroll, I have to by-pass the Square Team login to get to my dashboard, and some of the register tablets still have the option to clock in / out even though we disabled that feature and it shows as disabled at all locations.
Square Payroll does not export to an IIF file for QuickBooks Desktop or any other format / software, it *only* supports QuickBooks Online. This meant I had to manually enter all the payroll information into QBD by hand, each and every pay run. It was a nightmare. Square Payroll is upfront about only supporting QuickBooks Online but not having even a .csv download is absurd.
Our employees had wanted direct deposit for a long time. Square Payroll offers that - so long as you're with a bank they support. One employee had a checking account with a local credit union. Square Payroll rejected every single direct deposit, including the one made after I entered the employee's banking information myself. When we switched to OnPay, the employee had no problems with getting direct deposit at the same bank.
Reporting in Square Payroll is basically useless. All reports are .csv files that are generated & downloaded when you click a link. There is no preview of the 'report' and the explanations of what each report contains is seriously lacking. There is no customization of the reports. You have to choose between a few pre-generated options, then download the file and hope it contains the information you need. None of them were useful to running the business in any way.
I think I could honestly write a book about the issues we had with Square Payroll, only a few of which I touched on here. We left Square Payroll after 3 months for OnPay. We couldn't be happier with OnPay. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
