Running a business means juggling dozens of tasks – enter ADP and payroll, because payroll shouldn’t be one of the most stressful tasks you as a business owner!

That’s why CPA and financial educator Jamie Trull made the switch—and why she’s sharing her experience using RUN Powered by ADP®.

This post is sponsored by Run by ADP. All opinions expressed are my own. 

If you’re looking to choose a payroll provider that’s reliable, easy to use, and made for small businesses, here’s why ADP and payroll go hand in hand.

👉 Try RUN by ADP with Jamie’s link and get special offers here → jamietrull.com/adprun

Why Jamie Switched to RUN by ADP for Payroll and HR

When Jamie’s business started growing and she hired her first employee, she faced a common question: Which payroll software is right for me? She wanted something simple yet robust—something that would handle payroll and HR while saving her time and sanity.

Jamie had initially believed ADP was built for huge corporations. But after trying RUN by ADP, she realized it was the perfect fit for small business owners like her.

“I thought ADP was for big companies. I didn’t know they had something made for people like me with just one or two employees.”

— Jamie Trull, CPA

Questions You Might Have (And What Jamie Thinks)

If you’re exploring payroll options, chances are you’ve got some important questions. Jamie had the same ones before choosing RUN by ADP. Here’s a quick look at the concerns many small business owners share — and what Jamie now believes after using the platform herself:

🤔 Questions You Might Have	✅ What Jamie Thinks
“Can I trust this recommendation?”	Yes – Jamie is a CPA and financial educator who personally uses RUN by ADP in her own business.
“Is ADP right for small businesses like mine?”	Absolutely – She was surprised to learn ADP isn’t just for large corporations. RUN is built specifically for small businesses.
“Will this payroll provider make my life easier?”	Definitely – Jamie loves the automation, ease of use, direct deposit, and accountant access.
“What’s the downside?”	The only one she’s found: pricing isn’t listed upfront, and some add-ons may cost extra — but you can get a custom quote.
“Is there a special offer or benefit to using this link?”	Yes – By using Jamie’s link, you’ll receive special offers and access to ADP’s custom quote process.

This quick Q&A makes it easier to decide if RUN by ADP fits your needs — backed by Jamie’s real-world experience as a business owner and CPA.

A Simple, Automated Payroll HR System That Works

One of the best features Jamie points out is automation. With RUN and Done®, you can automate payroll runs on a schedule that fits your needs. Need to make a change? You can still process a manual run or even an off-cycle one at any time.

Other helpful features include:

• Direct deposit
• Time tracking integrations
• Self-service portals for employees
• W-2s and 1099s automatically handled
• Accountant access to reports and documents

All of this is designed to simplify your payroll and HR process.

Streamline Your Payroll Processing With Peace of Mind

Handling payroll processing means dealing with:

• Employee hours worked
• Wage calculations
• Payroll taxes
• Tax forms like W-2s and 1099s
• Compliance with federal, state, and local laws

ADP’s tools handle it all while ensuring you’re always compliant.

As Jamie says, “It takes care of all the stuff you don’t want to deal with, so you can focus on your business.”

What About Taxes? Yes—Federal, State, and Local Are Covered

Jamie loved how RUN by ADP simplified tax compliance. The software handles federal, state, and local filings automatically, including:

• Tax deductions and withholdings
• Payroll tax filings
• Year-end W-2 and 1099 distribution

No more guesswork. You get notifications when taxes are filed or if something needs your attention.

Custom Features Built for Small Business Owners

Jamie found several features especially useful:

• “Employee add” function to easily onboard new hires
• Reports for accountants
• Integrated benefits like retirement and workers’ comp

You also have the ability to grant your accountant full access—something Jamie used to ensure everything was always ready for review.

Choose a Payroll Provider That Grows With You

Jamie emphasizes that RUN by ADP scales as your business grows. Whether you’re a solopreneur paying yourself or managing a team of 10+, the platform adjusts to your needs.

If you’re unsure how to choose a payroll provider, look for one that offers flexibility, reliability, and support, RUN by ADP checks every box.

How Much Does It Cost? Get Pricing and Months Free

While Jamie notes that pricing isn’t always upfront, ADP provides custom quotes based on your business type and needs.

Plus, when you sign up through Jamie’s link, you’ll gain access to special offers and potentially get months free depending on your setup.

👉 Get pricing and your custom offer here → jamietrull.com/adprun

Final Thoughts from Jamie: “I Recommend It”

Jamie has tried several payroll solutions over the years. Her final verdict?

“I truly do recommend RUN by ADP. I’ve tried a lot of them, and this is what I personally use and love.”

Whether you’re just hiring your first employee or expanding your team, having a reliable system to handle your payroll and HR needs can give you back time, control, and peace of mind.

Get Started with ADP RUN Today

If you’re ready to simplify your business operations with a trusted payroll solution, Jamie invites you to try it through her link:

👉 Click here to get started with RUN Powered by ADP → jamietrull.com/adprun

Let ADP handle the payroll, so you can get back to growing your business.

This is an unedited video transcript. Please excuse any grammatical errors or conversational quirks.

ADP and Payroll: Running payroll should be easy, right?

You might be thinking, I’m a small business owner, how complicated can it be? But unfortunately, some of us learn the hard way that there are lots of things that can go wrong when it comes to payroll. But what if I told you it doesn’t have to be that way? There are payroll solutions out there that you can trust to be able to save you money and make sure that you and your team gets paid correctly and on time.

Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to do here today. I’m going to give you a full review of the RUN powered by ADP platform, including how I use it for my business. Now, this video is being made in partnership with the RUN platform, but I’m speaking to my personal experience.

ADP and Payroll: This is my real review as someone who actually uses this platform software.

And this is also a really timely video because the beginning of the year is a great time to switch payroll providers.

So if you’ve been thinking about it, then this is the time where it’s going to be the easiest to switch.

You can switch any time of the year, of course, but switching cleanly on the first of a new year is always a great time to start.

For those who don’t know me, hi, I’m Jamie Trull, your favorite CPA and financial literacy coach.

And here on my channel, I give you all the tools you need to stay informed, organized, and profitable in your business finances.

So please make sure to like and subscribe. Thank you so much.

Now, before we get started jumping into the actual Run platform, I wanted to tell you a little bit about why I switched to the Run platform to begin with.

Now, for a really long time, I felt like ADP in general really wasn’t for small business. When I worked for a Fortune 500 company, they used ADP, so I just assumed that ADP payroll was for bigger companies.

So for a long time, it didn’t even cross my mind to look into it until I heard from other people who had good experiences with it, and I decided I wanted to give it a try.

Now, Run, powered by the ADP platform, was their solution created for small businesses?

So it’s really targeted to those with 1 to about 49 employees or essentially under 50 employees.

So it’s very much built with the small business owner in mind.

But yeah, because it’s a brand of ADP, that means they have all the expertise and the history in delivering payroll for years and years and years.

This is not a new company, they’ve been around for a while.

So if you, like me, kind of wrote ADP off as a brand because you thought it was for bigger businesses, then I want you to reconsider and I’m glad you’re here.

So I just logged into my RUN platform and I love that right off the bat what I see is a new notification that ADP can now file my 1099s.

Uh, and what I love the most about it is that they can do it at no additional cost, which I am a really big fan of no additional cost.

So that’s really great for those of you who, in addition to having people who are employees on your payroll, you also have 1099 contractors.

You can use the RUN platform as well to file all of those reports to.

ADP and Payroll: Now the other thing I think is really great is that you can run all kinds of reports.

So single reports, report packages, you can build custom reports.

I am a huge fan of custom reports.

Being able to set up what you want to be able to look at easily and quickly without having to hunt and pack to find what you’re looking for is super fabulous.

And everything’s in one place.

Like I said, I think that this platform, as opposed to some of the other payroll platforms that I have used in the past, is It’s really easy to find the information that you are looking for.

And then, if you want to, you can also allow your accountant to access your reports.

That’s great.

It saves a ton of time, so you can do that here.

I’m my own accountant, so I haven’t done that.

But that is a great option for those of you who are going to be working with an accountant and they need to be able to reconcile payroll to your general ledger at the end of the year.

They can get direct access into your payroll platform so that you’re not stuck downloading a ton of reports for them.

And then as far as reports go, you can save your favorites down here.

So that’s the other great thing is that you can save things so that you can easily find what you’re looking for.

But they have all kinds of popular reports listed down below too.

And just to give you an indication too, when all of the pandemic programs were going on, you can see that they had tons of reports.

So they worked really, really closely with companies who were going through this. And that was one thing that I really liked.

I switched just after the pandemic, and one of the things that I thought was really great about the Run platform is how much effort they put into helping business owners through the COVID crisis, and that told me a lot about this company.

Now over on the side menu: Here, you can see we have Home, we have Payroll. We’ve got People.

So if you need to edit your employees at all. We have HR, so we’ll go see that in just a minute.

We have, again, easy access to your reports. And we have taxes, we have retirement, if that’s something you use.

I just rolled out a retirement plan through the Run platform this year.

So if y’all are interested to see how I did that and how easy it was and what the steps were, then just comment down below and I’ll make a video on that as well.

ADP and Payroll: And then we have health and benefits.

Again, this is not just a payroll plan. platform, right?

It does have, of course, the core functionality for payroll and doing all the reports and things that you need, but it has so much more than that with HR capabilities, with benefits, all the things that are accessible within one platform.

So you don’t need to go outside of the platform to bolt anything on.

It pretty much has everything that you need.

And then settings, we have time as well if you need to track time for your employees, and workers comp.

So it really has everything that you could possibly need, uh, on this easy to navigate menu.

So I’m gonna go to payroll real quick and show you exactly how this works.

Now down below it’s going to show me what my upcoming payrolls are and how much they are.

And it’s going to give me a whole bunch of options. So if I need to run a regular payroll, I can.

If I want to run an off cycle payroll, this is an option that I actually use quite a bit.

So sometimes I do reimbursements and things like that for my employees. I just run it as an off cycle payroll that I can do at any point in time.

And you can really quickly here manage how this is integrating between The run platform and whatever GL software, whether it’s QuickBooks, Xero, anything like that.

You can manage those integrations and make sure that things are actually mapping where they need to.

So it’s super duper easy.

ADP and Payroll: That’s something I love as an accountant and down here under more payroll options.

I love that they have. Um, set up, run, and done. And run and done is something that I actually take advantage of.

Which means that especially for those employees where you don’t have to put in hourly, you can just set this up to run.

I don’t run my payroll. I don’t have to press any buttons, uh, each month because I have salaried employees.

And so it will continue to pay them the correct amount unless I come in and have to make adjustments for any reason.

Or if I have to do reimbursements or something like that, I’ll just do a one off payroll run.

But in general, run and done makes things automated.

And again, that was something that there wasn’t the same options for this in every payroll provider that I used.

So I’m going to walk you through right here, if I were to run an off cycle payroll.

What that would look like.

So I would come in here, it would, I would determine if I was doing some kind of off cycle, a bonus, maybe I forgot to pay an employee for some reason, and I would select one of these.

Um, I’m gonna do just the off cycle payroll, you can kind of use this for anything, it’s essentially a special payroll run.

So when I come in here, I can determine if I need to select what deductions.

Because what I’m going to run here is a reimbursement, I don’t need to select any of these. But what I will do is I will go in and change the pay period.

So depending on what it’s for, if I’m running a reimbursement. For example, I reimburse my employees, um, once a month for the entire month.

So for this one, it would be, um, the first of November to the end of November with the pay period.

And then I would go into enter payroll, and it would bring up my employees here.

So I can decide essentially which of the columns that I am going to put this in.

So I can put in sick hours, vacation hours. If I want to, salary, anything like that.

In this case, um, I could enter in overtime, right?

In this case, I am going to put in misc reimbursements for a couple of my employees who are reimbursed for student loan payments each month.

And then I’m going to click save. And then I’ll go ahead and preview that. So it’s going to show me, these employees, it’s going to show me how much cash is going to come out and it is going to show me what the deductions are so I can really check through this, make sure it’s all correct.

Again, this will be through direct deposit and then I can go ahead and press approve or finish later, whatever I want to do.

And it was as easy as that.

It’ll tell me how much cash is required and when I need to make sure that cash is in my account so that I can check.

And then it also always sends me an email confirmation, which is nice as well, so that I can make sure that somebody else isn’t making changes that I’m not aware of.

ADP and Payroll: So then let’s look really quickly over here on the people tab.

And that’s going to be this tab where you can go in and edit any details about your current employees.

If they change pay rates or if they change addresses, all of that can be handled within this people tab.

And this is also where you’re going to onboard a new employee or a new contractor.

So let’s say you were going to add a new employee.

The neat thing is that you can invite the new hire to fill out the paperwork. Right?

So if you don’t want to be doing all of that, then you can invite them and they’ll be the person filling out all their direct deposit information, their personal information. All of that.

So you don’t have to gather all that information. It’s also more secure that way.

So you can just send an invite directly to them, which is the way I recommend.

But if you wanted to see what it was like to fill it out by yourself, that’s also an option.

So it’s going to have your first name,

Um, it’s going to have kind of all the general details about them, um, that you are going to be able to put in, their home address, um, all of that.

And then it’s going to keep going through this, and it’s going to go through their tax info, direct deposit, employment info, payroll info, earnings and deductions, right?

Paid time off, and then you review and complete it.

So again, I think this is easier if you have the employee themselves fill out the majority of this.

There will still be a few things that you’ll fill out on your side. But it really streamlines the process because you can invite that new employee to do the heavy lifting.

And the great thing too is that the employee is going to have access to the platform to be able to pull all of their own reports.

So that’s really nice when they’re needing to get their pay stubs for something or they want another copy of their W 2.

They can log in themselves and get all of that information without having to come to you first.

That’s great time savings as well.

Now, real quick, I’m just going to click through some of these other sections just to give you a feel for what’s in them.

And I may do future videos that go into more details.

ADP and Payroll: So again, lots of HR capabilities in here around hiring and onboarding benefits.

I’m Um, HR compliance, reports, all the fun things. Um, I love this too.

You can add on the employee handbook wizard so that you don’t have to make an employee handbook all on your own and it can actually help you create one.

So there’s lots of great HR help here as well. Again, we’ve got a reports tab, which I showed you before.

Then we have the taxes tab.

So this is where we can just pull those tax reports and anything that you might need related to taxes.

And like I said, the retirement tab here is where you’re going to be able to manage if you add a retirement plan.

So, I have added a 401k for my team, so I can go to the plan sponsor website here.

I have the participant directory plan overview that I can easily click on.

Um, and then it even tells me, you know, 100 percent of my employees are participating.

That’s amazing.

67 percent are maxing out their match, which is great, right?

So you can kind of get a feel for your retirement here, but it’s so great that it’s within the platform, right?

So I just decided that I wanted to make it easy on myself and start a retirement plan through my existing payroll provider.

Just so everything would be integrated easily.

And that has been a really good decision.

And like I said, please just comment below if you’re interested in hearing more about setting up my retirement plan.

And how that worked.

There are some amazing tax credits, y’all, for those of you who think maybe it’d be too expensive to set up a retirement plan.

That isn’t true, especially these days, so I hope to do some more content on that coming soon.

ADP and Payroll: And then there’s going to be more around health and benefits.

Same thing, you can actually go through the platform and set up health and benefits for your employees.

So the last tab I want to show you is the settings tab.

Just to show you what all you can update within the system.

Um, you can obviously update your profile, your company information.

Your bank accounts, um, what your users can do, what they can actually see from their side.

You can add users easily. Federal, state, and local tax information is all in here.

You can manage it there. Um, payroll information, right?

If you need to change your pay schedules. Um, earnings and deductions, company payments.

Again, run and done. You can get you from here as well. Um, departments, payroll reminders.

Who doesn’t love a good reminder? Time off.

You can manage that here. And then again, your integrated accounting, your general ledger, um, and a lot of these other, general settings as well.

So there’s lots of options for updating anything you need to update within the settings menu.

Hopefully, jumping into the Run platform gives you an idea for the ease of use and for how simple it is to navigate within the platform.

So talking about the pros and cons.

ADP and Payroll: What are the pros of the Run platform?

Well, like I just said, I think ease of use is really high up there.

I also think the automations, everything is automatic.

You don’t have to to click buttons if you don’t want to. So that run and done is really great for setting up automatic payroll periods.

There’s also automations for filing all the reports that you need. So things like your W 2, all of your quarterly reports, you don’t have to go in there and do anything.

It’s automatically going to be handled by the run platform.

So if you’re worried about compliance, it’s a great platform for you to make sure that you stay in compliance with all the many rules and regulations.

I also think customer service is a really big pro for the Run platform.

There is a human that you can actually pick up and call 24 7.

A real, live human being. Not a chatbot.

And in this day and age, that is a pretty big deal.

That’s one thing I’ve found in working with the Run platform and ADP in general, is they are very much people forward.

Right? So you will get real live people.

I have a real live rep that I can talk to that I know and can get to know.

Which is a little bit surprising in this day and age.

And so that’s something that I really like about the Run platform is that customer service element.

And another pro is that your package can really be adapted to your needs, right?

So it is not a one size fits all package. When you go and get a quote from the Run platform, it’s going to build what you need. you need and quote you for that.

So this is going to be customized to whatever your small business needs are.

So that means you’re not going to be charged for things that you don’t even need.

Now, what are the cons of the run platform?

Well, I would say one of them is transparency in pricing or kind of lack thereof.

Now, again, the reason for that is because they quote you out specifically based on your needs.

So they do quote custom quotes.

But that means that you need to contact a representative and then talk through it. And they will create something for you specifically.

But it’s not as easy as going on the website and seeing exactly how much it’s going to cost.

And so that is one of the negatives if you’re a person that likes to know up front what you’re going to have to pay.

It does take a little bit more to be able to understand what you will be paying if you sign up for the Run Platform.

Now, another con might be that there’s almost too much in there from a reporting perspective.

It can get confusing.

There are so many different reports.

But on the plus side, you can always take those reports andexport them into Excel to make more sense of them for yourself.

And the last thing that I would consider, maybe a little bit of a con, is that, um, is the add ons.

There are certain things that cost extra money. That’s pretty normal when it comes to payroll.

But for things like timekeeping, insurance, or retirement plans, that’s going to be an added cost on top of what you’re paying for base payroll.

So who is the run platform best for?

I would say it’s best for companies with under 50 employees who really are looking to grow and scale.

Maybe you want to offer retirement benefits or health benefits.

Things like that at some point in time, then it is a great program for you.

And the other great thing is if that doesn’t fit you, if that’s not what you’re looking for, then you can still go to my special landing page for ADP.

JamieTrull.com forward slash ADP run.

And you can go through the quote process.

And when you go through that quote, they are going to find the best ADP solution for you.

So if it isn’t run, they’re going to point you to another one and give you a custom quote for that.

So my overall review is that the run platform is a super solid choice.

If you are looking for payroll capabilities that are really easy and intuitive, and you are looking for maybe HR capabilities as well, and the ability for for the platform to grow with your small business.

So like I said, for special offers, jamietrull.com forward slash ADP run.

Or you can check out all the payroll providers I recommend and make sure it’s the best one for you by going to jamietrull.com forward slash payroll.

Thanks for watching this video.

We’ll for sure be doing more content on payroll in the future.

So let me know what you want to hear about down below.

Are there any other platforms you want to review for?

Definitely tell me and please like, subscribe and share and I’ll see you next time!

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