Arti Patel Martinez, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's episode of In the Know, we'll be learning more about the Payroll modernization feature.
Hey ProAdvisors, it's Arti, 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 Venky, who will demonstrate how to use the Payroll modernization feature.
Venky, welcome.
Vengatesh “Venky” Muralidharan: Hello! Hi everyone! Today I’m going to talk about Payroll modernization. We are making our payroll product more of a fit for large employers. Before we get started, I go by Venky and am based out of Mountain View. I've been working with the payroll team for the last five years. I'm excited to show you our changes today.
What we heard from customers is that payroll often requires too many clicks to Enter, Review, and Submit payroll. It's not easy to access a part of the payroll table, either by filtering, searching, or sorting. Those are not functions that we were allowing earlier. One of the other big sources of feedback was the number of clicks needed and the repetitive actions you had to take to process payroll.
So what we did was we moved the run payroll experience to a new table. It has some very cool functionality, such as filtering, searching, and sorting, and we also are building out a lot of bulk actions to help customers process payroll quickly and minimize the number of manual steps they take. This is available to customers in the US and Canada. All three SKUs—Core, Premium and Elite—will see it. We have started rolling out the experience and getting feedback from customers, but the full release will be in May 2026. That's when all customers will see the new experience.
Run Payroll is available on the Payroll Overview tab and the Employees tab, and you can click on that button. There's no change to that experience. With that, I will move to a demo of what we have built out.
As you see, when you go to Run Payroll from the Payroll Overview tab, you see your list of employees. You can see that there's a new look and feel to it; some additions I will call out. The Status column on who is included in payroll and who is not is being replaced by the check box that we had. So when you toggle someone off, they are skipped from payroll, and when you toggle them on, they are back in payroll. The functionalities, such as tabs being able to scroll seamlessly, all that have had some improvements.
As we move along, I'll point you to some of the other functionality we have, such as filters and search. There's a new addition of showing the Class Allocations in line, and you should soon be able to edit it in line. If you are an Intuit Enterprise Suite customer and you have a lot of dimensions flowing through, all of those will be available in line.
So this is the filtering experience. I can break down my employee list by their base pay type, which is hourly. Salary is what I'm demoing right now, and you see only hourly employees on the list. We are essentially helping break down your work into groups or batches, so that it's easier to do data entry and review. We expect that you finish your work, apply all the filters, and then click Review.
So going on to the Customize, these are some settings that you can explore to personalize the payroll table going forward. If you love coloring, you can allow alternate coloring. You can change the density of cells. You can go from compact or cozy to any of the views. There's also the ability to customize the order of columns and which columns you want to see. And once you do that, you can even prevent having to scroll horizontally.
The change in checkbox is because of this bulk action behavior. So we want to minimize the number of clicks, and as a result, the checkbox is how you can initiate some of the bulk actions. So you see the Add to payroll or Skip from payroll run, which can also be done using the toggle, but you also can change the payment method or write memos. We would love to build this out and have a lot more bulk actions coming soon, so that the number of clicks are drastically reduced.
There's also the sort functionality, so you can sort any of the columns the way you want. You can decide to use the employee name, which is the most common sort functionality we see, and then you'll see the table sorted in a new way. There's also the export as CSV function, so you can export the entire table and generate a CSV. So if you prefer to do some of your work in Excel or a different spreadsheet software, you can export it and then continue your work.
Given we are making so many changes, we would love to have feedback from you on what is working well in this new experience and what's not. So definitely use the feedback widget. We also gave you the option to switch back to the Classic View, just in case things are not working out. If some of these advantages are not landing or are not for you, you can always go back to the Classic View and wait to come back to the New View later.
One of the key changes we wanted to communicate is how the checkbox is given. People are used to it, so we are still testing this out and getting some feedback, but what we think is the checkbox could be better used for some of these bulk actions. That change would be a part of all the different, nicer things that we are rolling out, so even for lists of hundreds of employees, it's an easy navigation and easy review process, right?
Arti Patel Martinez: Okay, all right, let's see. If you have automatic payroll, but need to update it. Do you use the run payroll feature to do this?
Vengatesh “Venky” Muralidharan: If you are on auto payroll, they show up on the manual run payroll method, and are marked as someone who is on auto payroll. If you don't want to process their payroll automatically, you can always switch them over and say you want to pay them manually. So that would still be that existing experience and there's no change to that.
Arti Patel Martinez: Okay, excellent. Can you hide extra columns? When selecting columns to show, are the changes saved for future use?
Vengatesh “Venky” Muralidharan: Yeah, you can. Anything under Customize is saved for future use. So you can hide the columns using Customize on the top right of the table, and the product would remember.
Arti Patel Martinez: Excellent, okay! Then one more question: Can we have two different pay types? The example is a manager's salary and hourly. I think the example also is for restaurant managers who also work the floor.
Vengatesh “Venky” Muralidharan: Okay, so this is a recent change we rolled out so salaried employees can have hourly pay rates as well. It's not part of this change, but I think you should already be able to find it.
Arti Patel Martinez: Thanks so much for that walk through, Venky!
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