Connected payroll and workforce: Introducing QuickBooks’ new range of payroll solutions

For accountants and bookkeepers, payroll is a critical client service, but different clients need different levels of support. Some need straightforward payroll and compliance. Others need employee self-service, time tracking, job costing or more advanced workforce reporting as they grow.

Intuit is launching QuickBooks Payroll Core, Premium and Elite in the UK, built to address that range. Built on the Intuit platform, the new plans bring payroll, accounting and workforce data closer together, helping reduce manual processes and giving clients a payroll route that can grow with them.

A connected payroll platform for scalable growth

One of Intuit’s core goals is to help accountants and bookkeepers support clients by reducing payroll admin, simplifying connected workflows and giving businesses a clearer path to manage payroll with more confidence as they grow.

For many firms, payroll can become harder to manage when clients rely on disconnected systems. As employee numbers, pay structures, projects and reporting needs grow, what starts as a manageable workaround can create more manual work and duplication.

The gap between their clients’ growth ambition and operational capability — a perceived ceiling — is often driven by the growing list of responsibilities that comes as businesses scale. However, by bringing payroll, accounting and workforce data into a single, connected workflow, the three work together more closely — creating a stronger foundation for visibility, automation and decision-making, and giving accountants and bookkeepers more control when supporting clients as they grow.

A connected system becomes more important as clients scale. What may start as a manageable workaround can become harder to maintain as employee numbers, pay structures, projects and reporting needs grow. 

All three payroll plans benefit from Intuit’s faster feature delivery, an around-the-clock global engineering organisation, and insights built from serving millions of customers around the world, leading to the development of a best in class payroll solution.

Introducing the new QuickBooks Core, Premium and Elite

QuickBooks Payroll is part of Intuit’s wider platform vision, bringing payroll, accounting and workforce data closer together in one connected flow.

“Payroll can be time consuming and complex, presenting a high stakes administrative burden on employers. Errors often have big consequences and can affect employee trust, not to mention lead to penalties. 

This launch reflects our long-term commitment to building native payroll products on Intuit’s all in one AI-driven platform, giving UK businesses increased confidence in their payroll practices whilst significantly reducing the manual workload. 

The three products offer a multi-tiered, future-fit solution that aligns with how modern businesses grow, and how we plan to serve them over time,” said Leigh Thomas, Vice President of EMEA at Intuit.

Here’s how the three plans are designed to support different client payroll needs:

Payroll Core

QuickBooks Payroll Core is designed as an easy entry point for UK businesses with basic payroll needs, including director-only companies and first-time employers.

• It helps automate payroll calculations, HMRC submissions and pension requirements. 

• Run payroll with confidence and efficiency from day one.

Payroll Premium

QuickBooks Payroll Premium is designed for growing small businesses that need more than basic payroll. It helps streamline payroll administration while giving employers greater reassurance and control.

• Combines Core payroll functionality with employee self-service, helping teams reduce your admin time.

• Built-in integration with QuickBooks Time for time tracking.

• Adds a new Job Costing feature to help businesses track profitability.

• Includes access to QuickBooks product support.

Payroll Elite

QuickBooks Payroll Elite is designed for businesses with complex or advanced payroll and workforce needs, including larger organisations, mobile teams and project-based work.

• Builds on the functionality available in Core and Premium.

• Adds advanced time tracking and reporting capabilities, including geofencing and estimates-vs-actuals reporting.

• Helps businesses manage payroll and workforce complexity with confidence.

Benefiting from AI automation capabilities, Intuit has introduced a Gen AI–powered summary tool across all three plans, which automatically highlights what has changed in each payroll run compared to the previous one.

This feature leverages existing payroll data and compares with past payrolls to generate an AI summary, helping administrators to spot errors, and correct discrepancies before the payroll is processed.

The power of a unified, Intuit-owned stack

For many accountants and bookkeepers, supporting client payroll can involve working across multiple fragmented systems. This can mean more time transferring information, checking details and reconciling payroll data against the wider client record.

By building payroll natively within the Intuit platform, QuickBooks can bring payroll, accounting and workforce data into a more connected flow. This means that improvements in payroll, automation, AI and reporting can support the wider platform experience over time:

• Reduced need to move payroll data manually between separate payroll, accounting and workforce systems.

• A connected platform foundation, so payroll improvements can be developed alongside wider QuickBooks capabilities.

• Payroll plans designed to support accurate pay runs, HMRC submissions and pension requirements, with features and functionality varying by plan.

Explore QuickBooks Payroll and see how connected payroll can support your clients as their needs grow.

The information on this website is provided free of charge and is intended to be helpful to a wide range of businesses. Because of its general nature the information cannot be taken as comprehensive and they do not constitute and should never be used as a substitute for legal, accounting, tax or professional advice. We cannot guarantee that the information applies to the individual circumstances of your business. Despite our best efforts it is possible that some information may be out of date. Any reliance you place on information found on this site or linked to on other websites will be at your own risk.

This information is intended to outline our general product direction, but represents no obligation and should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. Additional terms, conditions and fees may apply with certain features and functionality. Eligibility criteria may apply. Product offers, features, functionality are subject to change without notice.