Browser and OS stats

Recently our friends over at Xero posted some stats on small businesses and the browsers / operating systems they use to access their accounting data. In the spirit of transparency – here’s a quick look at the statistics for PaymentEvolution Payroll (our online secure app for processing your payroll):

1 month Sept 16 to Oct 16 2012

Browser usage 2012 period

1 month Sept 16 to Oct 16 2011 (previous year)

Browser usage 2011 period

What’s most interesting to us (aside from the rapid decline in Internet Explorer usage) is the rate at which non-PC devices has grown. Cloud-based services like ours open up the possibility for small business owners to run their business from any computing platform they choose. And our clients have clearly voted – Mac and iOS (not shown) has gone from under 3% of our secure app traffic to now over 1/3. We’ve spoken to several clients that now exclusively run their business on iPads. While that in of itself may not be news today – the fact that these business owners can run their business on mobile devices means freedom. Freedom from having to operate from your desk. Freedom from having to run your business during “regular business hours”. And most importantly, the freedom to do everyday business tasks (like bookkeeping and payroll) from anywhere.

This is amazing change in a very short period of time. Obviously, if your old desktop payroll software can’t keep up – we can recommend one that will :)

Better help

You’ve probably noticed a new look for our support, community and help forums. We’ve streamlined getting you the answers you need – like improving search and refreshing our help content.

What’s new

• Improved search – better suggestions for existing articles that match your query, integration with all content (feature requests, community help, announcements, tip & tricks etc)
• The ability to submit a support request online (and not just through email)
• Support history and log – you’ll be able to see the status of your support requests and interactions with our support team

Why the change

Over the past 18 months we’ve closely monitored the use of our previous community site. We noticed some interesting usage patterns. First, folks most commonly come the site looking for instructions on how to do actions like running a payroll. We’ve created a “getting started” section for these most frequently visited topics. Second, when questions were asked in our old public community site that pertained to a specific account or situation, we didn’t have a good way of tracking down the affected profile. This new support site encourages people to login so we can better assist with these types of inquiries (though you can still post questions or suggestions anonymously). If you’ve already logged into your payroll account, you won’t need to authenticate again on the support site.

We’ve also seen our clients move beyond email as a way to communicate. While email is still important, we wanted to be able to take support requests via the web, and other channels like Twitter. Importantly, we wanted to ensure a consistent (high-level) of response and service – which we can now do through “tickets” which you can track the progress of. If you haven’t already – go to the “check your existing requests” link in the menu above.

Lastly, we wanted to greatly improve our “search” functionality with instant suggestions and more relevant responses. The new search is a big improvement and will help you find the answers you need faster.

Our old community site is still up and we’re migrating the content as needed. If you see something that we should post, just let us know or create a topic on the site itself.

Looking ahead

Over the next few months we’ll be integrating support directly into the payroll app and making the workflow of processes like direct deposit enrolment happen right here. This will give you better insight into the status of your requests (you’ll see a full history of your support requests) and provide you a better way to communicate over your preferred contact channel.

Let us know what you think

Integration with Freshbooks

We’re excited to welcome FreshBooks to our growing list of integration partners!

Now you can do payroll with FreshBooks

FreshBooks is online invoicing and time-keeping software for small and micro businesses. The service has easy to use time tracking which you can use to track the time spent on projects and client interactions. Getting paid for your work is simple with FreshBooks – the online invoicing feature generates electronic invoices and helps you get paid faster for the services you provide. And now, ensuring that you (and your staff) gets paid for your hard work is really simple too – PaymentEvolution payroll now seamlessly brings in your time data from FreshBooks so you can run a payroll in under 30 seconds.

Not using FreshBooks yet? Sign up or try a 30 day trial. Integration with FreshBooks is available on any of our paid plans.

With PaymentEvolution Payroll you’ll get easy to use yet full-featured payroll that will grow with your small business:

• Payroll calculations effortlessly done for you
• True custom deductions, benefits and earnings – run your payroll the way you like
• Always up to date with full record keeping with beautiful reports
• A super employee site where they can get their full pay history and even tax information like T4 slips – all electronic!
• Seamless import of time data from FreshBooks so you can pay your staff accurately every time

Get started – and simplify the way your pay your staff!

PaymentEvolution Payroll is evolving

The next major revision of our popular payroll app has been released. We’ve focused on improving the user experience and making it more intuitive to get your payroll done. Next time you login, you’ll see a new look and feel as well as some neat new features as requested by our client community. Your data is all there – no need to install anything or run a cumbersome upgrade – you’ll get all the new stuff automatically.

What’s new

• Support for Québec

  We now have support for Québec specific calculations – like the Québec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP),  Québec Pension Plan (RRQ/QPP) etc. While the service isn’t en Français at this time, we do support Québec-based businesses processing payroll in English.

• Dashboard and payroll overview

  

  New dashboard overview
  Getting a quick overview of your payroll account is now even easier with the new payroll dashboard. Here you’ll find important notifications (like service updates, feature changes etc), deadlines (like the next time you need to remit funds to the CRA or Revenu Québec) and a nice graph giving you details about previous pay runs. The chart is dynamic – go ahead, try it! You can tap/click an item in the legend to remove (or add it back again) so you can get a quick synopsis of your payroll history. Hover over an item and you’ll get the details.

• Streamlined navigation

  

  Streamlined navigation
  We’ve analyzed the most common tasks that you perform in the system and have simplified access to the most frequently used features. For example, we’ve moved running a payroll from a sub-menu to a top-level item and moved other one-time functions (like setting up Add-Ons) to a sub-menu. Overall, you should find that getting in, performing your most common tasks will be faster and more intuitive.

• Improved payroll steps

  

  Fewer steps to process payroll and improved time sheet entry
  We’ve made it even easier to process complex payroll by streamlining the steps needed for a pay run. Start by selecting the date range you want to pay your staff, then select the employees to be paid, review the calculations and approve payment – that’s it! Behind the scenes we take care of important details like showing you only the employees who are eligible to be paid during that pay period, taking care of additional benefits, deductions and custom earnings and validating the payments to be made.
  

  Quickly view employee earnings during the pay run
  Review individual employee earnings during the pay run with a quick overview and interactive chart that shows you the breakdown of their pay.

• Enhanced employee records

  

  Cleaner, easier to read employee profile
  Employee profiles also get a cleaner, easier to navigate overhaul. You’ll see the employee’s last 5 pay runs charted for you – again, in an interactive way so you can see the details you want. By entering their email address in the profile we’ll display their picture (we currently poll Gravatar for that image). As before, you can apply custom pay rules (deductions, benefits and earnings) to each employee.

• Custom pay rules

  

  Powerful custom pay rules – process any type of deduction, benefit, earning and even vacation policy
  Custom pay rules have been a feature we’ve had for some time. In this release we’ve made it easier to find and make changes to these rules. You can use this powerful feature to create custom deductions, benefits and earnings for your staff. We even support custom vacation policies.

• Integrated help with search

  

  Easily find the answers you need with the new searchable help and community forums
  We’ve improved access to our community forums and frequently asked questions. Help is now integrated and full searchable from within the app

• Extend payroll with Add-Ons

  

  Extend and customize payroll by activating add-ons from our great partners
  Our add-ons get easier to integrate with a central area to activate them. Whether you want to make your bookkeeper happy by integrating payroll data with your online bookkeeping system or want to start accepting credit cards in your small business – you’ll find it here.

• Beautiful reports

  

  Enhanced reports like the “update summary” which condense a lot of data into a highly visual chart that’s easy to read and navigate
  We’ve overhauled your reports to make them easier to read on screen. For example, large tables are now responsive – allowing you to easily select the columns you want to display (and automatically fit the table to your screen size). We’ve added a few reports requested by our community – an “employee report” which summarizes all your staff, an “ePay report” which details the transactions and amounts coming from your bank account and a “pay run history” which shows all your completed pay runs.
  One challenge we faced was how to display many sets of data in an intuitive way. For example, in the new “update summary” report we created a new visual chart that breaks down your current pay run and gives you a granular view into each category of deduction, earnings and benefits. The chart is interactive with tooltips that expose the detail behind the payroll pie chart.

We hope you like the enhancements we’ve made and hope you’ll keep the feedback coming on how we can continue to improve the service.

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Sneak peek at our upcoming release: part III

JUNE 15, 2012

tags: dashboard, design, innovation, news, online accounting,payroll, software-development

Upcoming enhancements to your payroll dashboard

We’ve heard from a lot of folks that having a quick overview of their payroll would really help them better manage their finances. Our challenge was to condense a lot of pertinent information into a concise and easy to read format that was legible at a glance but also contained the “drill-down” data you need to run your business.

As part of our next release we’re beefing up the account dashboard to show you dynamic (and beautiful!) charts which you can use to get a quick overview of your payroll history. Important notifications like cutoff dates are also displayed prominently so you can take action if needed.

It’s functional and highly visual – making your payroll experience amazing (yes, I said “payroll” and “amazing” in the same sentence!)

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Sneak peek at our upcoming release: part II

JUNE 13, 2012

tags: design, news, online accounting, payroll, software-development

A better way to get your payroll done

Better managing the payroll process and making it easier to get your payroll done – that’s what we’re aiming to do with our upcoming release. We’ve streamlined the payroll process while maintaining advanced features your accountant will love. It’s simple enough for your startup with just a few employees and can scale to meet the needs of your kick-ass, rapidly growing business when you add ten, fifty or even hundreds of employees.

Here you’ll see a functional but rich way to see individual employee earnings during the payroll process. You’ll get a clear indication of their net pay and as much detail as you need for their custom earnings, deductions and benefits.

Sneak peek at our upcoming release: part III

Upcoming enhancements to your payroll dashboard

We’ve heard from a lot of folks that having a quick overview of their payroll would really help them better manage their finances. Our challenge was to condense a lot of pertinent information into a concise and easy to read format that was legible at a glance but also contained the “drill-down” data you need to run your business.

As part of our next release we’re beefing up the account dashboard to show you dynamic (and beautiful!) charts which you can use to get a quick overview of your payroll history. Important notifications like cutoff dates are also displayed prominently so you can take action if needed.

It’s functional and highly visual – making your payroll experience amazing (yes, I said “payroll” and “amazing” in the same sentence!)

Sneak peek at our upcoming release: part II

A better way to get your payroll done

Better managing the payroll process and making it easier to get your payroll done – that’s what we’re aiming to do with our upcoming release. We’ve streamlined the payroll process while maintaining advanced features your accountant will love. It’s simple enough for your startup with just a few employees and can scale to meet the needs of your kick-ass, rapidly growing business when you add ten, fifty or even hundreds of employees.

Here you’ll see a functional but rich way to see individual employee earnings during the payroll process. You’ll get a clear indication of their net pay and as much detail as you need for their custom earnings, deductions and benefits.

Sneak peek at our upcoming release: part I

Upcoming enhancements to managing employees

We’re putting the finishing touches on some big changes to PaymentEvolution Payroll. It’s an exciting release with some much needed user-experience enhancements and some major new features that our thousands of clients have asked for. When we first started the concept of a free payroll service we always envisioned a continuously improving service guided by the feedback from our user community. This release builds on our robust rules engine and focuses on three major areas of improvement that we’ve heard from our clients:

• User experience - quicker access to core payroll processing, streamlined options and better visual cues
• Reporting - enhanced visualization of reports
• Extensions - tailoring your payroll service to work with your favourite apps

Here’s a quick look at our upcoming employee enhancements – better history, cleaner interface and faster workflow.