For 12 years in business I managed to avoid using an outsourced payroll service.  I simply used QuickBooks for processing my payroll and while it was a little more costly per person than a large payroll house like ADP or Paychex, it was simple and all in one place.

As ForeSite has grown I decided I needed more help with my HR functions.  I tried a small HR company but had nothing but issues with availability and consistency.  I heard about ADP TotalSource which sounded like a dream come true.  I could get a full scale HR department for a fraction of the actual cost, and get the advantage of scale when using their benefits.  The only hitch was that I HAD to use their payroll services for this to work.  I only had two requirements for this project: 1) The payroll transition had to be seamless for  my employees, and 2) All of the information from a payroll run needed to be bought back into QuickBooks so I can run reports as I do today.  ADP promised me that this was not a problem so I went ahead and signed up.

Unfortunately, they stretched the truth about getting data back into QuickBooks and I found myself out of luck after dealing with several levels of support at ADP.  So as a software development shop, what did we do?  We built it ourselves.  I had our development team create an application that can take the simple tab delimited download report from ADP and create all of the proper journal entries so my accounting records are accurate.  It works great and has solved my problem, but buyer beware if you are signing up for one of these payroll services.  Getting data back into your accounting system is not as easy as they say it might be without having someone do additional work or having a program like the one we have built at ForeSite.