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Comment by kejaed | Hacker News Reader

While OP said he is based in NYC, if there are any Canadians on here looking for a bunisess account I’ve used the RBC Small Business eAccount for a couple years. No minimum balance, no monthly fee. It has worked well for me.

https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/business/accounts/small-busines...

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Compared to the US , in Canada, you have a LOT fewer options for serious banks. Anything that's not one of the 'big 5' will have limited range of services and technology integration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_(banks)

It's both good and bad, in my opinion. Canada's much stricter regulation of the banking industry meant that in the 2008-2009 financial crisis, when small to medium sized US banks (all the way up to Washington Mutual sized, which was huge) were failing and being absorbed into other banks, FDIC insurance paid out, etc, there were no significant bank failures in Canada.

Agreed - it's awesome. More tips - if you have to do payroll (T4s) then try out Payment Evolution. The interface is rubbish but it's cheap, easy, and fairly automatic.

Also - we moved to Plooto for paying contractors - they email folks as the money moves between stages. It's cut down on the background admin side of 'when will this land'.

I'd actually like to share a cautionary tale for you. I used PaymentEvolution for a few years at my last company. Got lured in with the free deductions calculator while I was still paying employees by cheque, then upgraded to their managed payroll. Ultimately the service didn't scale well - lots of issues, not just UI - and I ended up switching services. It was at that point that I found out that switching payroll providers is incredibly inconvenient. You need to coordinate quite a difficult switchover, usually in the middle of a tax year, with a lot of data to re-enter. I went through this process twice before finally switching to ADP, one of the institutional options, which to my surprise was actually cheaper than the startup options.

Annoyingly, ADP actually does provide pricing that's as low as any payroll startup in Canada (wagepoint, collage, etc), they're just not transparent about their pricing. You can get really good pricing, but you have to negotiate it with them. But after dealing with several buggy startup payroll providers, ADP's service is absolutely flawless, handles every edge case without issue. For my second company, I went straight to ADP.

I'd love it if Gusto would come to Canada (actually have a friend who's an early employee), but it's unfortunately not a priority for them.

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