The Sage Group has been in the software business for more than 35 years, and its flagship products are its accounting and payroll services. The company's Payroll Essentials Plus service is reasonably priced, and its report and record screens support more detail and provide more insight into your payroll situations than the competition does. Unfortunately, its user interface is outdated and unfriendly, which makes the process of actually paying your employees complex and confusing. Pricing and Setup Once you've signed up for Payroll Essentials Plus, which costs $49.95 per month for up to 10 employees, you can begin the complex setup process. The most time-consuming element of setup for any payroll service s the creation of company and employee records and preferences, and Sage is no exception. Everything must be entered, and entered correctly. Sage Payroll Essentials Plus goes above and beyond in this area, however, supporting an incredible amount of detail for these critical forms—more than is really needed for small businesses, in fact. Data types that seem excessive for company records include Certified Projects, Labor Codes, and Organization Groups. Employee records in services at this level don't normally ask for information like veteran status, dependents, gender, and ethnicity. Overall, though, its setup is much more thorough than Square Payroll's and that's generally a good thing, even if it is overkill in some spots. Sage Payroll Essentials, like its competitors, walks you through this data-building process in a logical order. If you're adding an employee, for example, you first enter contact and employment details, then hourly rates or salaries, taxes, deductions, direct deposit information (if applicable), and so on. These sections are represented by links in the left vertical pane, but you can move through your data entry process using Next and Previous buttons, too. Premade screens contain labeled blank fields, so it's easy to know what's being requested. You have to complete some fields manually, but others offer drop-down lists, checkboxes, or buttons. View All 4 Photos in Gallery There are other setup tasks that you have to tackle, one of which some of the competitors I've reviewed don't offer (OnPay does): defining user access permissions. If more than one person will be able to sign on to the site and do work there, you can limit him or her to specific activities and areas. Trouble at Home Sage Payroll Essentials' home page—its dashboard—contains some of the same elements as competitors' opening screens, like links to current, scheduled, submitted, and last committed pay runs. The problem is that they're not all live links. Annoyingly, you can't click through to the latter two. There's also a message section at the top for communications from the site. Oddly, though, the other content on the page is a complete list of reports, which is impressive, but not usually found on dashboards. SurePayroll has the best overall home page, one that it displays information about and links to current and recent payrolls, reminders, links to off-cycle activities, and payroll trends in snapshot graphs. Interface and Navigation Sage Payroll Essentials Plus' overall navigation theme is understandable. The site opens to the dashboard, and four toolbar tabs—supported by sub-tabs—divide the site into its four primary areas: Payroll (Run Payroll, Employees, Company, Reports, Pay Grid Preferences), Employee Services (private pages where employees can look at their own data, W-2 information, and so on), Front Row Reports, and Settings (user access permissions). Other sites use similar conventions. When you go deeper, the latter three are easy to understand and navigate. But when you're in the screens that deal with the real meat of the site (creating records and running payroll), navigation is not as clean, especially when compared to a service like Gusto. It's unclear sometimes whether you've completed a section, and many pages that deal with only one small element of a topic or process could easily be combined with others. Too many screens, too many mouse clicks, and not enough clarification. Every other application I reviewed has a reasonably attractive, modern-looking user interface; Gusto in particular looks state of the art. Sage Payroll Essentials Plus doesn't look like it was designed and developed recently. It looks old, and it looks like something a larger company would have used a decade or so ago. Even heavy-duty midrange accounting applications look and feel more up-to-date and lighter. Accounting for Hours Worked When you click Run Payroll, the site displays a list containing current and planned pay runs. Click on the one you want to process, and the service shows the data entry screen, a grid with employee names and salary amounts already filled in. Pay type options are generous here. If you have hourly employees or extra items to process for salaried employees (bonus, commission, and so on), you highlight that employee's line. Other sites let you enter numbers for hours and other pay types directly within a grid or table or other one-screen design, but Sage duplicates that individual's row in the space below the grid, where the data entry is actually done. You then have the option to save (which updates the main grid) add a check, or add a check line. This extra step seems odd, as does the fact that there's no Next button right here, which is standard for this type of process (though navigation buttons appear eventually in this process). Instead, there's a list of links in the left vertical pane for all of the options available for processing payroll, like Process Timesheets, Adjustments, Check Calculator, and Submit Pay Run. This is a nonstandard way to manage this task. It takes far more time, and you may not realize it if you miss a step. Again, this feels like a design that's either quite outdated or designed for much larger companies—or both. Good News, Bad News "Uneven" is the word that comes to mind when you're using Sage Payroll Essentials Plus. It is deep and sophisticated in areas like employee and company data management, but it's also difficult to follow the process of paying staff. It has dozens of reports, most of which are directly related somehow to personnel and payroll, but its dashboard lacks the information and links it needs to be truly useful. It also lacks the native iOS and Android apps that provide critical mobile access to managers, apps such as competitors like Intuit Online Payroll offer. Our latest reviews of payroll services consist of both applications that haven't changed much—or at all—since we last looked at them, like Intuit Enhanced Payroll and Sage Payroll Essentials, and solutions that have come a long way, like Patriot Software and OnPay. Our Editors' Choice, Gusto, is one of the latter. One of the youngest services we've reviewed, Gusto's innovation, automation, and exceptional user experience make it the one we recommend to smaller companies getting started with online payroll. While you're thinking about getting a better handle on your money, you should also be sure to read our roundups of the best online accounting services and tax software. Sage Payroll Essentials Plus Bottom Line: Sage Payroll Essentials is affordable and detailed, and it offers a rich collection of reports, too. Unfortunately, its unfriendly interface complicates the process of paying your staff.

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