CPP, EI and income tax worked out from the CRA's own tables for every province and territory, Quebec included. Pay stubs on payday, T4s in January, and the XML file the CRA accepts.
$15 CAD a month. Two employees or twenty.
Set the company up and add your people on the free plan. Payroll needs Premium.
A base fee plus a few dollars per employee per month is the standard shape of payroll pricing in Canada. It is a reasonable model for a vendor and an expensive one for you, because the bill grows every time you hire. Set your headcount and see the year.
| Provider | How it is priced | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Argo Books Premium | $15 flat, unlimited employees | $15 | $180 |
| Payworks Payroll | $21 + $2 per employee | $31 | $372 |
| Wagepoint Unlimited | $40 + $6 per employee | $70 | $840 |
| Knit Lite | $40 + $6 per employee | $70 | $840 |
| QuickBooks Payroll Payroll Core + EasyStart | $60 + $5 per employee | $85 | $1,020 |
At 5 people, the cheapest of those costs $192 more a year than Argo Books.
Provider prices are published small-business rates for payroll only, taken at each vendor's cheapest plan that allows unlimited pay runs, because Argo Books does not cap them either. Wagepoint and QuickBooks both sell a tier around $20 cheaper that is limited to one pay run a month, which is worth having if you pay monthly. QuickBooks Payroll also sits on top of a QuickBooks Online subscription, so its real cost is higher than the figure shown, and Payworks quotes per client rather than publishing a rate card. Check the current rate with any vendor before you switch.
That deadline does not move, and the penalty for filing late is charged per slip. It is also the moment a year of small payroll shortcuts becomes visible at once, because the slips are built from every pay period you ran, not from a summary you can adjust in January.
In Argo Books the slips come from the pay runs you already approved. There is no year to reassemble.
Payroll software is not judged on features. It is judged on whether a number was right eleven months ago. These are the places that decision actually gets made.
Quebec runs its own income tax, pension plan and parental insurance. Argo Books calculates QPP, QPIP, Quebec income tax and the federal abatement separately, and works the RL-1 figures out for you. Staff in different provinces can sit on the same pay run.
The CRA reissues its tables every January and July. Each edition is a data file fetched the first time a pay period needs it, so there is nothing to install and no chance of running January on last year's figures.
If it does not hold the table covering a pay date, it says so and declines to calculate. A wrong deduction on someone's pay is the kind of error nothing downstream catches, so refusing is the safer failure.
A regular remitter pays by the 15th of the month after payday. Argo Books names that date and the amount belonging to it, rather than leaving you to work out which month you are paying for.
Payroll holds the most sensitive data in the business: names, social insurance numbers and what everyone earns. Argo Books is a desktop app, so those records are written to your machine rather than uploaded to a provider.
Approving a run records what each person was actually paid as an expense, so payday matches your bank statement instead of being a figure you copy across from a separate payroll service.
If any of those matter more to you than the per-employee bill, one of the providers in the table above is genuinely the better answer, and it is cheaper to find that out now.
The closest comparison on price. Where the flat fee overtakes $20 plus $4 a head.
Payroll billed on top of a QuickBooks Online subscription, against one flat price.
A quoted service contract, against software you download and run yourself.
The full feature walkthrough: pay runs, deductions, stubs and year end.
The same as if you have one. Payroll is part of Argo Books Premium at $15 CAD a month, or $150 a year, with no per-employee fee and no per-pay-run fee. Every other Canadian payroll provider charges a monthly base fee plus a few dollars per person per month, which is why the gap in the comparison above widens with every person you hire.
No, and this is where the comparison above understates the difference. Payroll providers do payroll, so you are also paying for whatever keeps your books, and QuickBooks Payroll specifically is an add-on that requires a QuickBooks Online subscription underneath it. Argo Books Premium is one charge covering the payroll, the ledger, invoicing, expenses, receipt scanning and reports. The free tier covers everything except payroll, so you can set the company up before paying anything.
Three things, and they are the reason a service costs more. It does not file your T4s: it builds the slips and the XML submission the CRA accepts, including the T619 transmittal record, and you upload it through My Business Account. It does not remit your source deductions: it tells you the amount and the date it is due, and you make the payment. And it has no direct deposit, so paying staff is still a transfer from your bank. If you want the February deadline to be somebody else's responsibility, that is worth paying a per-employee fee for and you should.
Run a pay period you have already run somewhere else and compare line by line: gross, CPP, EI, federal tax, provincial tax, net. If the net pay matches to the cent, the calculation matches. This is the only test of payroll software worth doing, it takes about ten minutes, and it works before you have paid for anything because you can set the company up and enter your people on the free plan.
You can, and it is the question to think hardest about with any payroll change. Your year-to-date figures have to carry across exactly or the T4s will be wrong at year end, so the safest moves are the start of a calendar year or the start of a quarter. Whichever point you pick, run one period in both systems and compare before you cancel anything.
No. Argo Books is a desktop application, so employee records, social insurance numbers and pay history are written to your own computer and the deductions are calculated there. There is no payroll provider holding your staff data and no account to create. Your books move and back up like any other file, which also means the backups are yours to keep.
Not one worth putting your filings through. Keeping current with two CRA rate editions a year, Quebec's separate system, and a T4 specification that changes inside the year is continuous work, and software nobody funds to do that is the software that is quietly wrong in February. Argo Books charges $15 a month for payroll because that maintenance has to be paid for. The free tier covers the rest of the app indefinitely.
Download Argo Books, add your people, and enter a period you have already run somewhere else. Compare the deductions line by line. That is the only test of payroll software that means anything.
Free plan for the rest of Argo Books. Payroll is on Premium at $15 CAD a month, or $150 a year.
