Ask a payroll bureau what they charge and you'll usually get three numbers: a monthly base fee, a per-employee fee, and a per-run fee. Stacked together they're impossible to add up in your head, which is exactly the point — a quote you can't reproduce is a quote you can't compare.
For a 12-person shop running bi-weekly, the per-run fee alone bites twice a month, every month. Add an off-cycle run for a termination or a correction and you pay again. The base fee is there whether you run payroll or not. None of it scales with the work the software actually does — it scales with how many times you touch it.
Then there's the cost you never see on the invoice: the float. When a bureau collects your CPP, EI and tax remittances and sits on that cash for days before sending it to the CRA, it earns interest on money that was never theirs. It's your source deductions, parked, working for someone else. That's a real cost — it just doesn't have a line item.
Onest charges one number you can multiply: $4.99 per employee per month. No base fee, no per-run fee, unlimited runs, and we never hold your remittance money to earn float. Twelve employees is $59.88 a month — that's the whole bill.