Paychex Flex, of Paychex' Online Payroll Services, is a cloud-based human resource management and payroll platform. Paychex offers core and specialized services, and scales to meet the needs of small businesses, SMBs, and large enterprises.
$59
per month/+$4 per employee
Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 7.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.
In my experience, Paychex Flex is well suited for small to medium sized businesses. It has been helpful in streamlining the onboarding process and it is easy to update and maintain employee profiles and records. It has worked will in a non-profit environment where there is clergy pay and housing, which can get quite complicated. I cannot think of a scenario where it would be less appropriate.
Adaptive is much more versatile than most planning software, and in most ways better than Excel for planning and analytics. It is great and bringing together data from multiple sources, especially if on the Workday platform, and really allows your team to collaborate in real time without any issues unlike trying to work in Excel workbooks at the same time or needing an adminstrator to enter data for you. Power users can even update models and reports themselves and share with others. The flexibility of designing your own models is also great in allowing you to plan however granular you need and have different methods of planning for different business units but bring it all together consolidated.The reporting is the least useful feature. Yes, OfficeConnect gives you all the power of Excel and PowerPoint and is great if you can utilize it, but for now it only works on Windows when many businesses have shifted to Apple or Google platforms. Also, OfficeConnect is not fast or easy to use, like the web reports and web dashboards, which are great for quick ad-hoc reports but not great for presentation-level reports. This creates a huge disconnect in the quickness of analytics, if you want to run and show in depth analytics you'll need OfficeConnect due to the limited functionality and limited formula capabilites of Adaptive web reports which requires someone to build and maintain and refresh the OfficeConnect reports which is slow and not easily shared with other users.Also the planning functionality of the 3 sheet types have not been updated in years. Some new features or sheet types would be greatly appreciated.
It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.
Overall I like the features that Paychex Flex offers. I am sure that there are other features that I am unaware of, so I am excited to see if there is more that Flex is capable of to make my job easier. The basic features are really user friendly and easy to access. If there ever is an issue customer service is great
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
Some things could be streamlined. For example, we could do custom options for the "add items" tab which has so many options that we never use. "Medical Pay" could be something that the system remembers for the applicable employees. Salaried employees' salaries should definitely be auto-filled. Overall the system works well but I think it could be improved to be easier to use and read.
Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.
We have not experienced any difficulties with unplanned outages. Notifications are always made for outages, and they do not effect normal business operations.
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
Unless there is lag time within the internet, the Paychex Flex website loads exceptional fast, pages load quickly and reports that I need to print or download load quickly. If I need to create a specialized report, once I complete it I receive an e-mail telling me my report is ready to be downloaded. Changing between web pages is fast as well.
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
Our dedicated representative is one of the main reasons we are sticking with Paychex Flex. If it were not for this person, other platforms could provide the same/similar functionality. It is the ability to speak with someone that understands our business and is willing to get questions answered in a timely fashion that keeps us with Paychex Flex.
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
It was easy to understand and follow along. I do like the informational videos that we can utilize before we opt to call in for customer service support. It has made a difference since sometimes that resolves the issue I may have had and saved myself a phone call to Paychex support.
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
Implementation was very smooth. The most cumbersome task was entering the current employees into the system during initial set up, but Paychex staff handled most of that and verified against prior system reports as well as internal reports provided to ensure 100% accuracy.
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
We still use QB Desktop Pro to maintain a Check Register / Overall Balance for the company, but once having tried QB Payroll Online for about 3 months prior to finding Paychex Flex I can tell you that there's just no comparison. QB online is VERY EXPENSIVE and not so user-friendly. I hated every minute of those 6 payrolls we ran through QB online.
Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.
Employees can log in at home and get up to date information on their FSA balance and any medical bill reimbursements they may have uploaded. At renewal time they have the ability to make changes to their FSA or for new employees star the enrollment.
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
I do not believe we have saved anything additionally. The time we've had to spend to get things to hopefully work is sad. This is the reason we've had to turn off all extra "products" of Paychex Flex. Time and Attendance is horrible. Benefits management is horrible. The user experience is horrible.
One thing I do not understand is why are updates for states, cities, counties, school districts, etc. not automatically updated? Should we not get a big red flag if we have an employee living/working, being paid in CA, but they aren't set up for CA sick time? If it is required to be on the paycheck stub to show the balance of the sick time, why would we not be notified that we are out of compliance?
Adaptive Insights has had a positive impact on organizational expansion. With our break-even analysis we have created, what would once take place in a notebook or Excel, we have created templates and can run a conservative estimate on revenue and costs quite quickly. We have cut back on research and time on expansion by months this way, to mere hours.
One negative impact is the costs with implementing connections between our other ERP systems with Adaptive Insights. Currently, we would like to have near real-time data, but cannot due to the costs. Currently, I am tasked with uploading from multiple systems and this can be time consuming, especially during a close.
Overall, positively we have had an excellent experience. The ease of the functionality and the easy learning curve have enabled everyone on my team to have an enjoyable experience.
