Harpoon is a web-hosted accounting and finance app that helps freelancers and consultants set and meet their financial goals. In addition, Harpoon provides useful tools to help users collect revenue and manage finances. Features include time tracking, invoicing, expense tracking, project scheduling and more. The vendor’s value proposition is that their solution that helps users boost their freelancing career.
$19
per month
Patriot Payroll
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
Patriot Software headquartered in Canton, Ohio offers Patriot PAY, their benefits administration and payroll software.
$174
Pricing
Harpoon
Patriot Payroll
Editions & Modules
Single User - Unlimited Everything
$19
per month
Basic Payroll
$17/mo + $4 per employee/contractor
Accounting Basic
$20/mo (unlimited use)
Accounting Premium
$30/mo (unlimited use)
Full Service Payroll
$37/mo + $4 per employee/contractor
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Harpoon
Patriot Payroll
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Patriot Software has two payroll options to choose from: Basic Payroll, and Full Service payroll software. Both start with a simple three-step payroll process. With the Full Service Payroll, Patriot will collect, deposit, and file federal, state, and local payroll taxes on the customer's behalf; end-of-the-year payroll tax filing is included at no extra charge.
Print W2s on 8 x 1/2 x 11 plain white office paper to hand to employees, or post to the free employee portal. Also, Patriot Software offers free direct deposit.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Harpoon
Patriot Payroll
Features
Harpoon
Patriot Payroll
Payroll Management
Comparison of Payroll Management features of Product A and Product B
If you're freelancing or running a small marketing agency, I'll steer you strongly towards Harpoon. It's such a terrific fit for this business type. It provides easy invoice management so if that's all you care about, use Harpoon this way. If you want a tool that will guide you towards success, Harpoon helps you do this when launching your account. Know what you want to earn, what it takes to get there, and how you're doing along the way. What financial software for freelancers provides simple project tools? Harpoon.
Patriot is well suited for an office with a small staff without complicated tax issues to manage. My office had 2 employees: one full-time and one part-time. There were no 1099's issued, and no special tax exemptions or other special tax situations for employees. The owner was a sole proprietor, so she was not paid as an employee through Patriot. It was easy to quickly run simple payroll tasks on a bi-weekly basis in my situation. However, I believe a more complex situation with more employees would still be suitable for this software if there was an employee dedicated to performing payroll and human resources tasks. Information must be manually entered each payroll period and submitted before 8pm to process at the scheduled pay date, so if there was not a dedicated employee for the task, it would be easy to end up paying employees a business-day late. I know that Patriot offers add-on services for human resource tasks, such as time sheets and tools to manage sick days, benefits, and record employee attendance. I did not require these extra services, but I like that Patriot offers services a la carte so that there is no need to pay for tools you do not need
Patriot's software is very easy to use for running payroll. It takes about 30 seconds to do.
The payroll reports are abundant, easy to find and print, and make my accounting very easy.
Having a full service payroll provider as easy to use as Patriot leaves me with more availability to focus on treating patients and running other aspects of my business.
Sometimes expense reporting bring up duplicate transactions, which may be more of a fault of the API that connects my account, which is Plaid
Would be nice if in the future, they can offer ACH as one of the payment options for invoices
There are some redundancies that pop up when setting time frames for client work and the projects attached to them. If they aren't aligned, it can cause inaccurate reporting. If it just sent it once and it took care of both functions, it would be easier
The third party direct deposit processor Patriot previously used was not particularly easy to work with...but Patriot just brought all direct deposit processing in house.
Clergy housing allowance has to be manually entered each payday. They tell me they're close to adding the capability of making it (and other similar pay types) as a recurring item.
The setup process is geared toward novice users who need to be hand-held through the process. That's great for those who need it but a more streamlined, no-frills process payroll pros would be welcome.
I think it is great once things are setup as for general user looking to look for simple things like a copy of a paystub or a current pay rate for an employee. However, to find specialized things like a state withholding number or payroll integration settings those do require a bit more digging to find or possibly a call to customer service for help.
The few times I've needed help or had questions about the platform, the founder got back to me. And fairly fast. The extra effort resonated well with me
Generally speaking it is pretty good that when I need to call somebody up for a payroll question I can generally within five minutes get somebody on the phone and they can help me resolve the problem or specify where specifically I need to go or contact to find my answers. However, that being said, for my specific situation as a partner my assigned contact has not always been very responsive.
These others accounting/invoicing platforms did a great job with the invoicing and bookkeeping, but at the time I used them, none of them had any goalsetting features. I also found the metrics dashboards a bit underwhelming.
Cost is the major factor here, but the ease of use (and design of the interface) is a big advantage for Patriot PAY. Items are (ironically) more "intuitive" to find and manage in Patriot PAY than Intuit.
Patriot PAY is closer to ADP/Gusto/Paychex in how it looks and feels and operates in a full-service capacity, but it is much more affordable.
By providing a nice all-in-one platform for managing clients, related projects, invoicing and bookkeeping, it saved me from having to work with multiple platforms.
Saved me from wasting any further time trying to research competitors and trying out other software
Patriot allows the entire team to be on the same page when it comes to a campaign or donor. All of the information is in one place to see how much a donor gave or communication with that donor by a specific team member.
It provides comparative historic data and donor analysis. The organization of donations by appeal allows teams to know which campaigns were successful in previous years.
