Personal Finance (Not Investing) • Cheap payroll service that you can "hibernate"

Update, after several years: I'm still with Intuit. They transitioned their Online Payroll product to "Quickbooks Online Payroll" a while back. Surprisingly, most of my config was correctly moved to the new service.

Customer service is still a nightmare. This year, I had three issues:

• A Q3 form from the period when I had the plan hibernated* was "stuck" in a state where I couldn't mark it as manually filed, and it prevented me from submitting any of my Q4 payments and forms. It took a couple hours on the phone to even get to the point where they set up a support ticket, the ticket itself produced no updates or callbacks, and none of the phone agents ever acknowledged what the problem actually was. (Except one, who was a supervisor who told me, "You must have been transferred by accident - you're not supposed to be able to contact this dept.") They did fix the problem but didn't alert me to the fix. The supervisor did credit me one month's fees, though.
• My state forms/payments were still blocked after the fix. The only error message was, "This form isn't ready yet. We're working on it." They became unblocked just two days before my plan month was up. Again, several hours on the phone, and again, only one agent was eventually able to give me a date for the fix - information that should have been available to any of them, or better yet, part of the error message itself.
• One payment wasn't actually made on the date it was scheduled for, but instead a couple of weeks later, the day before my plan month ended.

In the end, everything worked out (I think). Payments/forms were submitted shortly before the deadline, about a month after I started the process. And I was able to hibernate the plan one day before being charged for a new month. So Intuit (now Quickbooks Online) remains the least-worst option for me. $62 for one month of usage, instead of whatever $30 x 12 months when 11 of those months have no activity.

Patriot, mentioned above, is another service I looked into. Their service seems simple enough to use, and I was told by customer service that it had some sort of hibernate feature. In the end I didn't go with them - though a friend of mine did, and he seems happy. From my notes:

• doesn't show S-Corp health insurance / HSA on payroll - says they're added at the end of the year on W2
• can't delete deduction/contrib definitions once you've used them, so you can't test things

* - as a refresher, if you haven't read the whole thread: I pay myself once a year, in December, and need a service that can be "hibernated" without fees for the rest of the year. (I file all-zero Q1/Q2/Q3 returns manually, and run a single payroll in Q4 through the service.) Obviously, this won't be everyone's situation - but it is mine, and I find it to be the simplest & cheapest way to handle things. It allows me to set salary / 401k / etc. once, at the end of the year, so that I can zero out the profits from my S-Corp and not risk showing a loss or a massive pass-through that might raise audit flags.

Statistics: Posted by meeotch — Thu Feb 12, 2026 3:00 pm — Replies 8 — Views 1663

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