You can pay your employees by direct deposit or even generate cheques anytime with QuickBooks. Yes, QuickBooks offers you Payroll feature to make your work simple and easy. To get the Payroll service from the QuickBooks you have to subscribe to enable the Payroll features. You can also enable and use the Manual Payroll in QuickBooks function manually without a subscription. The main difference is Payroll with a subscription has more features than Payroll without a subscription. Yet you can perform all necessary and basic functions of Payroll feature in your QuickBooks Desktop without a subscription.