Sense with Cents

If you handle your own payroll and pass reports or data to your accountant at quarter-end and year-end, here is a question worth asking. Does your accountant tell you which payroll software to use? If so, why?

I can answer that. Money.

Some payroll software vendors pay a signing bonus, a monthly commission, or both, to anyone who steers a customer their way. That includes accountants. The bigger vendors run formal programs for it — partner tiers, referral dashboards, revenue share that grows with the number of clients enrolled. The money is real, and the small business owner is the one paying it. The accountant collects on the back end. The customer pays the full subscription on the front end.

I will name names, because the point does not land without them.

• ADP advertises up to 75 percent revenue share plus ongoing residuals for accountants who refer clients.
• Gusto runs two tracks. The partner program pays up to 20 percent revenue share, or an equivalent discount the accountant can either keep or pass to the client. The separate referral program pays a Visa gift card on a sliding scale — 300 dollars for the first referral, 400 for the second, 500 for the third, 700 for the fourth, and 1,000 dollars for the fifth and every one after that. The referred business gets 100 dollars.
• BILL pays referring accountants up to 500 dollars per converted client.
• QuickBooks Online (Intuit) runs the ProAdvisor Revenue Share program. Accountants earn 30 percent of the billed subscription price for the first 12 months on QuickBooks Online, plus 30 percent of the base fee on QuickBooks Workforce payroll and an additional 15 percent of the per-employee fee. Through July 31, 2026, Intuit is also paying a bonus of 300 dollars per new Workforce Premium client and 500 dollars per new Workforce Elite client. And here is the part worth pausing on. Intuit’s own program page answers the question “Do our clients know that we are receiving revenue share?” with: “We do not disclose to your clients that you are receiving revenue share when you invite them.”

There is nothing illegal about any of this. There is also nothing hidden about it on the vendor side. The numbers are right there on the vendor partner pages — Gusto even publishes its referral tier schedule on its own legal page. The question is whether your accountant has mentioned the program to you.

Worth lingering on the Intuit line a moment longer, because of what it says about the structure of the arrangement. Most vendor partner pages leave the disclosure question implicit. Intuit answers it out loud, on their own marketing page, as a feature of the program. The vendor is telling the accountant, in writing, that the customer will not be informed. The silence is not an accountant’s oversight. It is a feature the vendor is selling. That is the kickback economy with the lights on.

Where does the money come from?

Worth pausing on this, because it is the part the marketing pages do not draw a line under. Software vendors are not handing out 1,000 dollar Visa gift cards out of generosity. They are not paying 75 percent revenue share out of love for the accounting profession. The money is coming from somewhere, and that somewhere is the subscription the customer pays every month.

Run the math on Gusto’s fifth-and-after tier. The accountant earns a 1,000 dollar gift card for that referral. Gusto recovers that 1,000 dollars over the life of the referred customer, plus the cost of the bonus, plus a margin on top — otherwise the program would lose money and would not exist. The customer pays that 1,000 dollars, slowly, in their monthly bill. They may not see it as a line item. It is in there.

The same logic applies to the 75 percent revenue share at ADP, the 500 dollar BILL bounty, the 30 percent QuickBooks Online cut, and every other partner program. The vendor is not absorbing the cost. The customer is. The customer is funding the kickback that pushed the customer onto this software in the first place. That is the actual transaction, with the marketing peeled off.

This is the part most worth sitting with. Every commissioned recommendation is a recommendation the customer is paying for, twice — once in the subscription, and once again in the higher price the subscription has to carry to fund the commission.

“But the customer gets something too”

Sometimes the customer does. It is usually a token. The fact that something flows back to the customer is the part the marketing pages lead with, and it is the part that makes the program feel like a shared win. Worth looking at the actual numbers.

On Gusto’s gift-card track, the customer who funds a 1,000 dollar gift card to the accountant gets a 100 dollar one in return. Ten to one. On BILL, the customer gets a 10 percent discount on a subscription that funds a 250 to 500 dollar payment to the accountant. On QuickBooks Online, the accountant chooses, per client, whether to take the 30 percent revenue share or to pass a 30 percent first-year discount through to the customer — one or the other, not both. ADP advertises “preferred discounts” without specifying the amount.

The customer-side benefit is real. It is not nothing. It is also, in every program I looked at, a fraction of the accountant-side payment. The customer is getting a slice. The accountant is getting the loaf. Both are coming out of the same subscription. And in some cases — the QuickBooks Online structure being the clearest example — the accountant has to give up the commission entirely for the customer to receive the discount, which is a decision the customer never sees being made.

What the silence sounds like

Here is what I hear, several times a year, from longtime Medlin customers. Their accountant has told them they should switch to a different payroll software. Sometimes the message is firm — your bookkeeping would go more smoothly if you were on this other product. Sometimes it is softer — I would prefer if you used this. The customer emails us, often a little rattled, asking whether we are going away or whether they are doing something wrong.

In every one of those emails I can remember, one thing has been missing. The accountant has not mentioned that the recommended software pays them. Not the rate, not the program, not even the fact that one exists.

A recent example. A customer wrote to tell us their accountant had instructed them to stop using Medlin and switch to Gusto, on the claim that our federal and state withholding calculations were incorrect. To the customer's credit, they did not just switch. They wrote back to us, said they wanted to keep using Medlin, and offered to pay us — credit card on the table — to review their actual payroll and prove the math.

We did. No charge. No credit card needed. We did not even verify if they were a current Medlin customer — they were, but we did not ask. We stand by our calculations to anyone who asks, and we can and do prove their accuracy. This is not hard. The tax agencies publish their calculations. Anyone can look them up. The calculations were correct. Federal withholding, state withholding, all of it. The accountant's claim was not a close call. It was simply wrong.

There are two charitable readings of that accountant's claim. Either the accountant was not actually a payroll expert — and a lot of accountants are not, because preparing returns or keeping books is not the same skill set as calculating a paycheck. Or the accountant was steering the customer toward a product that pays a referral. I do not know which one it was. The customer does not know either. And that is the point. When the recommendation comes wrapped in a technical accusation, and the commission program on the other end is not disclosed, the customer cannot tell whether they are being given advice or being sold a product.

There is nothing wrong with an accountant trying to make ends meet. Running a practice is real work, and a referral check is a legitimate way to add some margin. The problem is not the income. The problem is the silence. Every fee an accountant earns should be visible to the customer paying for the advice — the engagement fee, the per-return fee, the consulting hour, and yes, the commission from the software the accountant is steering you toward. Transparency does not pick and choose which revenue streams it covers.

That is the transparency gap. The vendor's program is public. The accountant's enrollment in it is private. The customer is making a software decision with one of the relevant facts withheld. And the customer is the one paying the higher subscription that funds the whole arrangement.

“But they are giving me a discount”

Here is a wrinkle worth pulling out separately. Sometimes the accountant offers a discount on the recommended software — a few dollars a month off the list price. That can look like the accountant is doing the customer a favor.

Read the Gusto partner terms and you will see how the discount actually works. The accountant chooses, per client, whether to take the partner discount as a revenue share into their own pocket or to pass it through to the client. Either way, the discount is money the vendor was already willing to give up. If the accountant passes a piece of it through, the rest is still flowing somewhere — usually back to the accountant in a different form, or to the firm at a tier level the customer never sees.

A discount is not the same as no commission. A discount is sometimes a smaller commission, shared. Worth asking which one you are looking at.

What we do and do not do at Medlin

Medlin does not pay accountants signing bonuses. Medlin does not pay accountants monthly commissions. We do not want you paying more for our software so we can hand part of it to someone else. That is money out of your pocket for no benefit to you.

We have, in the past, offered referral discounts where both the referring customer and the new customer received a one-time discount, and we will likely do that again. When we do, it is a true discount. We do not raise prices on anyone else to cover it. We simply take less revenue on those two customers. The discount comes out of our pocket, not someone else's, and it is a one-time event. There is no dashboard, no tier, no monthly check.

Worth being specific about how these add-ons came to exist. We added each one because it makes payroll easier — and because we use them ourselves. In January, time is gold. Paying for a W-2 e-file service that just happens, instead of printing, separating, stapling, and collating paper forms, is an excellent investment. We are not the only ones who notice that.

Some of these add-ons do not even pay for themselves once support is factored in. The 941 e-file is the clearest example. The IRS enrollment process is strict enough that walking a customer through their first submission takes more support time than the commission on the e-file covers. We offer the service because customers need it, not because the commission funds it.

Worth saying plainly because it is the opposite of how the partner programs work. When we offer a discount, the first year on a new customer can be a loss-leader sale — we may not recover the discounted revenue until the second or third year, and we recover it only if the customer stays. All of the risk sits with us. If the new customer cancels after a year, we took the loss and got nothing for it. That is fine with us. We would rather earn a long relationship by treating the first year as an investment than fund a one-time accountant bonus out of the customer's subscription. The partner-program model flips that arrangement — the accountant gets paid up front, the vendor recovers it from the customer over time, and the risk lands on the customer. We do not run our business that way.

The “easier for the accountant” version

There is a softer version of this conversation worth addressing too. The accountant says a particular payroll software is easier to work with, or that they only support certain platforms. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is also true that the accountant is enrolled in that vendor's partner program. Both things can be true at once, which is what makes the conversation tricky.

Here is the part worth sitting with. You pay your accountant to handle things for you. You do not pay your accountant so that the work is more convenient for the accountant. An accountant who is good at the job should be able to take a payroll report from any reasonable software and work with it. I know what is in those reports because I write the code that produces them. Gross wages, taxes withheld, employer taxes, totals by quarter. The format varies. The substance does not.

If your accountant tells you they cannot work with what you have, that is worth a follow-up question. Not a confrontational one. A plain one. What about my current software does not work for you? The answer will tell you which conversation you are actually in. (I wrote more about the principle of meeting people where they are in Help Me Help You.)

What honest disclosure looks like

Medlin does receive a small commission on four items. I am going to list them, because the whole point of this post would collapse if I did not.

• Nelco, for 941 and 940 e-file. Integrated, which is convenient. You can pay any vendor of your choice if you want to enter the information into their online form yourself. By using Nelco, Medlin can produce data you import into Nelco, saving the data entry step.
• Nelco, for W-2 e-file. Or you can file directly with the SSA at no cost using their self-service site, and where required, with your state. We tell customers about the SSA option in the program. Nelco offers extras such as mailing forms to employees and an employee self-serve web portal.
• Medlin Forms, for paper goods. Pre-printed check stock, W-2 forms — guaranteed compatible by Medlin Forms and backed by Medlin Software. Or you can use any compatible vendor, subject to that vendor's guarantee.
• Kotapay, for ACH direct deposit. Or you can use any ACH vendor you choose. ACH data format is well known and used by all processors. In the early days of consumer ACH, many banks handled this for free for their customers. That is no longer the case.

The Medlin Forms commission is a long-standing example of the principle. Many check-form vendors design their products to be incompatible with more common check styles on purpose. That is vendor lock — once you are printing on their proprietary layout, you cannot easily switch to anyone else. Medlin has always done the opposite. We use the most common check styles available so that customers can buy compatible forms from any number of suppliers. If you use the vendor we recommend, we do receive a small commission. You also get a guarantee from the forms vendor, and one that Medlin will help you enforce on your behalf if something goes wrong. The commission is small. The interoperability is not.

Three things hold across all four. First, we recommend each one because we think it is a good service, not because of the commission. Second, where the vendor offers tiered commission levels, we stay on the lowest tier. We are not building a business around stacking up referral revenue. Third, when a self-service or do-it-yourself option exists — like the SSA's free W-2 filing — we tell customers about it and support it. That last part matters because it is the difference between offering a convenience and locking you in. We are not interested in vendor captivity, ours or anyone else's.

That is the test for whether disclosure is real. Disclosure that comes with no alternative is not disclosure. It is a notice. Real disclosure means the customer can walk to the other option without friction, and the vendor will help them get there.

What I would hope an accountant would do

The opposite of what I have described in this post is not complicated. It looks like this.

When a client asks for software guidance, suggest a few options other clients are using and explain what works well about each. Suggestions, not directives. The choice stays with the client.

Accept whatever reasonable software the client is already using. The reports are not exotic. Any competent accountant can work with them.

If a recommendation does come with a commission, a bonus, a gift card, or a revenue share on the other end, disclose it. Up front, without being asked. Tell the client what the program pays, what tier you are on, and whether anything is being passed through. Let the client weigh the recommendation with the full set of facts.

That is not a high bar. It is just the basic honesty that any professional relationship runs on.

What to ask if it has not been offered

If the disclosure has not come on its own, this is the question to ask. It is not an accusation. It is a plain one, and an accountant who is operating in good faith will answer it without hesitation.

Do you receive any payment, commission, discount, gift card, or revenue share from the payroll software you are recommending? If you are offering me a discount, is that discount coming out of a commission you are also receiving? If so, would you tell me how much, so I can factor that in?

An accountant who answers cleanly — yes, here is the program I am on, here is what it pays, here is what I am keeping, and here is why I still think this software is the right fit for you — has done the job. You have the information. You can decide. That is what the relationship is supposed to look like.

An accountant who deflects, gets defensive, or treats the question as rude is telling you something else. File that away.

Why you have probably not read this somewhere else

Worth naming, because it is part of the picture. The professional ethics literature actually does address this. The AICPA Code of Professional Conduct, under its Integrity and Objectivity Rule, has required CPAs to identify, evaluate, and disclose conflicts of interest since the 2014 revision — including, by direct example in industry commentary, situations where a CPA recommends a software product from which the CPA receives a commission. The CPA Journal, the publication of the New York State Society of CPAs, ran a full recap of the guidance in August 2016. A wave of CPA-firm articles in late 2025 reiterated the same principle, using payroll software commissions as the canonical example of a conflict of interest. The doctrine is not hidden.

What is missing is the customer-facing version. The professional articles speak to CPAs about CPA ethics. They are written for peers, in peer language, on peer-facing sites. The customer is not the audience. None of them name a vendor. None of them cite a dollar amount. None of them quote the “we do not disclose” line off Intuit’s own program page. The principle is on record. The translation to the customer’s actual decision is not.

That is part of why this post exists. The other reasons are structural. Everyone in a position to write the customer-facing version — with the knowledge, the audience, and the platform — almost always has financial reasons not to.

The other payroll software vendors will not write it. Every major one of them runs a partner program that pays accountants. The article would indict the practice they participate in.

The accountants will not write it. A working accountant who publishes this article alienates every peer who is on a partner program, which is most of them. The professional bodies have the same problem.

The tech press that ranks payroll software will not write it. Those ranking articles fund themselves on affiliate commissions from the same vendors. The small-print disclosure at the top usually reads something like “clicks may earn a commission, which supports testing.” They are running the same model on the publishing side that the accountants run on the advisory side, and they will not write the piece that interrogates the model that pays them.

The HR and payroll consultancies writing blog content will not quite write it either. There are plenty of close-but-not-quite articles — “questions to ask your accountant before choosing payroll software,” that sort of thing — and the commission question is conspicuously not on the list. Asking the customer to interrogate their accountant’s referral arrangements would invite the customer to interrogate the publisher’s referral arrangements next.

So the conversation about the kickback economy in this industry is mostly held among the parties who benefit from it. The customer is not at the table. That is the gap this post is trying to close.

One more thing worth saying, because the section above could read more sweeping than it is meant to. Plenty of accountants, vendors, and writers in this industry are on partner programs and disclose them cleanly — they tell the customer what they receive, they explain why they still think the recommendation is right, and they let the customer decide. Those are the honest ones, and they are the ones worth doing business with. This post is not against the partner programs. It is against the silence around them. An accountant who tells you up front what they earn from a recommendation has already passed the test this post is asking the reader to apply.

The bigger point

Whoever your accountant is, and whatever software you use, the relationship works when the incentives are visible. Most accountants are honest people doing competent work. A formal partner program does not automatically make a recommendation bad. Sometimes the recommended software really is the best fit. The problem is not the program. The problem is the silence around the program.

A professional you engage should be working for you, not telling you how to work. You are paying for advice. You are entitled to know what is shaping it. And you are entitled to make your own choice about the rest.

See also: Help Me Help You and DIY Payroll vs. Payroll Service.

This post was lightly cleaned up with AI for grammar and flow. The opinions, the operator experience, and the company practices described are mine and Medlin's.