Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll be exploring updates to the new Payroll Agent.
Hey, ProAdvisors, it's Jaclyn, and you're watching In the Know, where you get exclusive access to demos of Intuit product enhancements by the leaders who built them.
Let's jump right in with Alok for a look at how to use the new Payroll Agent. Alok, welcome.
Alok Bapat: Hi. Thanks so much. Jaclyn. My name is Alok. I am a product manager on the Mid-Market and Workforce Solutions Team, and I'm going to take you through what we've done for the Payroll Agent.
Let's start with the problem. We know that our customers spend a lot of time collecting or entering and reviewing information needed for running payroll.
This includes reminding employees to submit data on time, correcting any errors that they might have made or any errors made during kind of aggregating payroll data, and finally, ensuring that the information makes its way into the right fields on the payroll prep page before payroll is processed and employees get paid.
This process is very manual today, so it's prone to errors and could take a long time to do. Based on this, what we've done is introduced an AI solution that can collect hours, overtime hours, paycheck tips, report reimbursements, and time off, all via SMS or the workforce app.
It's a pretty smart and intelligent system that reaches out to your employees directly on your behalf, and has the ability to detect anomalies in data that's submitted. It can also makes sure that you, as the employer, are always in the loop and you have final control over what data makes its way into the payroll draft before payroll is processed.
So again, the principle is we will do it for you while making sure you retain full control over payroll processing.
So let's take a look at how this Payroll Agent shows up in your product. You can access the agent on the business feed and on the payroll overview page. Here—based on your eligibility, and again, we have certain eligibility rules in place—you will see Payroll Agent appear as such on the business feed.
It appears automatically with payroll prep with your team's time and pay details. And when you onboard it, you kind of get a sense of how this agent will work, how we'll first get to know your business, and then how it'll reach out to your employees.
In order for it to reach out to your employees, you, as an employer, first have to educate or onboard this agent to your business.
They'll first try to learn what your business is and how your business is set up from a payroll standpoint. This includes how many employees you have, how you pay them, and which pay types you use to pay those employees. It will also help you create a collection plan.
This collection plan is truly what the Payroll Agent uses to reach out to your employees on a certain cadence, ask your employees for the right information that only you want it to ask, and also make sure that it is able to identify any anomalies and flag them to you.
Once you've set up this collection plan, the agent kicks off an interaction with your employee via SMS or the workforce app. It first introduces itself as a digital assistant that's kind of collecting data for your business. And once the employee provides consent, it begins to collect hours for the ongoing pay period in which the collection needs to happen.
And in natural language responses, the employee can submit hours, overtime, tips, and reimbursements. They can report time off, and you as the employer, once the data is collected, can get notifications that an employee has reported time off for reimbursements. But after the collection is complete, you also get a status check and an insights message where the agent now tells you that, for this ongoing collection period, we know that your gross pay is a certain amount. You should expect that when payroll is processed, we will take money from one of your checking accounts, and these are the total payroll hours for the ongoing pay period.
We also give you insights such as any changes to your payroll costs pay period over pay period. As an employer, you also have the ability to report any bonuses or holiday pay and overtime for your employees. And we are looking to further enhance the capabilities that you have as an employer, such as submitting hours on your employees behalf.
So let's see how all of this comes together in a video demo. Hopefully this kind of adds some color.
Video demo voiceover: Meet the Payroll Agent, your new AI assistant for fast tracking payroll prep. This innovative agent takes the burden off your shoulders, handling the collection of hours and all the necessary payroll data all through simple, intuitive text messages. Setting up your Payroll Agent is incredibly straightforward. Our agent automatically leverages what we know about your business, and past pay runs to suggest an optimal collection schedule. For hourly employees where time tracking is regular, the agent smartly suggests reaching out on a set schedule. This ensures time tracking stays consistent and up to date, minimizing last minute scrambles.
As the admin, you're always in control. You can easily set preferences like:
- How often the agent communicates with employees.
- The types of pay information to collect: think regular hours.
- Overtime.
- Paycheck tips.
- And even your preferred collection method.
You can even get a glimpse of the exact text messages the agent will be sending, giving you full transparency and peace of mind.
What about your salaried employees? The agent recognizes that regular hours aren't typically reported for them. However, it's smart enough to know that things like paycheck tips or overtime might sometimes be included. Based on this, your salaried employees can easily reach out directly to the agent with any such information, ensuring every detail is captured without you having to chase it down.
Beyond just gathering information from your employees, the Payroll Agent also empowers you, the payroll admin, with several convenient options:
- First, the agent will send a payroll summary for your quick review and approval. No more digging for data. It's all presented clearly.
- Second, you can text the agent anytime to check on your payroll status. Get instant updates right from your phone.
- And finally, the agent can even help handle a few admin tasks like updating pay rates, all through a simple text exchange.
Say goodbye to poking around complicated menus. Once your collection plan is finalized, you simply send over the necessary consent pieces to your employees. And just like that, the Payroll Agent is active and ready to begin collecting payroll data. When it's time to collect hours, the agent first sends a text to employees asking for their consent. Once they consent, it will then ask for the required payroll data for the pay period. In just a simple text exchange, the agent gathers employee responses and seamlessly transforms that data into accurate payroll information.
On the admin side, policy updates are now easier than ever. The payroll agent is able to assist with this via text. No more poking around in product menus trying to find the right setting, and when it comes to checking payroll status, you, the admin can text for this at any time. The agent then responds with a summary of information as well as any anomalies that have been flagged. These are unusual entries that require your quick review and approval. You can now log into QuickBooks and easily see these anomalies.
In this case, an employee has entered overtime hours for the first time as the payroll admin, and you can easily confirm or override this information, ensuring accuracy. In addition, you can also access a comprehensive activity log of all the payroll agents’ activity, ensuring full visibility into every update and interaction.
Lastly, we arrive at the best part: payroll is ready. The agent sends over a message giving you a summary of all the payroll details. You have the option to log into the product and run this, or with just a simple yes response, run payroll directly through the text message, payroll is done, and just like that, the payroll agent is ready to start the next collection cycle, making your payroll process smoother and faster than ever before.
Alok Bapat: That was a quick demo video of the Payroll Agent in action. Now let's look at some Fast Facts:
- The agents are currently available to QuickBooks Core, Premium, and Elite customers who don't use auto payroll, aren't actively using QuickBooks time, only have a single pay schedule, and are using certain pay types to calculate payroll.
- These are some early guardrails we've put in place to ensure the agent can show up to that eligible cohort the best way possible. We are actively working to train the agent to support these additional cohorts: customers who have multiple pay schedules or who are using a wider range of pay types, so that it's available to more customers.
- It can be accessed from the payroll overview page and the business feed.
- Right now it's available just in the US to eligible customers, but we're working to make it available to all payroll customers by September.
These are some helpful resources at the bottom, and there's a knowledge base article that will be available in our community very soon.
That's a walkthrough of the Payroll Agent. We really look forward to seeing how it creates value for you and how you as a customer use it.
Jaclyn Anku: Alok, thank you so much for that demo. And thank you for watching. If you find this update interesting or helpful, go ahead and like, comment, and subscribe. That's all we have for now.
For more product updates and demos, check out our In the Know Hub. We'll catch you next time.
