ADP WorkForce Suite vs. CenterPoint Payroll

EmpCenter is really well suited for companies with minimal variety in time keeping needs. Certainly somewhere that has fairly regular work schedules and operational needs the system would be programmed for and meet those needs quite well. I think they assert themselves as a product specifically for those more complex companies, and I believe it is one of a few products available for companies with many employee types and complex work schedule and pay needs, but because of those complexities each have their own specific customizations I feel it is difficult for the company to then manage the different products that end up existing. Each ends up being unique so applying large scale changes doesn't work well as something we may request and need if applied over EmpCenter in general may cause problems for another company. Therefore everything has to be done on an individual basis and is more time consuming and costly.

CenterPoint Payroll has been excellent for our company, with approximately 150 employees. I can certainly see it being excellent for smaller companies and larger companies. I don't know if there is a size of company at which it would become difficult or limiting to use - I can't foresee any of the functions or features becoming limiting factors as company size increases. To a certain extent, I could see the robustness of CenterPoint being a bit more than what is necessary for a tiny company of less than 5 employees, but it would certainly be able to do what is required for them.

Incentivized

• A lot flexibility in configuration of the system
• works well with other systems. We were able to collect data from another time system, Avaya phone systems and even a point of sale system with not a lot of difficulty.
• They know their product and integration points. They were able to troubleshoot problems with hardware time collection devices quite quickly. We found the devices they sold to be quite durable.
• Out of the box they have more reports than I would have anticipated. Creating new reports was sometimes a task if it was complex but there were usually similar reports you could use as a starter template

• Customization options to meet your company's payroll needs.
• Excellent customer service and tech support.
• Logical and easy-to-use user interface.
• Ability to customize reports and exports.

Incentivized

• Difficult to use
• Retroactive adjustments must be made by an administrator
• Delegation of duties must be done by an adminstrator
• Data must be exported and then imported into pay system, does not support interface
• Product has not changed or been updated in 4+ years

Incentivized

• Perhaps include a pop-up description of an button, or a link to the help section details, when you hover over the button for more than 3 seconds.

Incentivized

After spending close to 5 years to decide on which payroll product to acquire for our University, I cannot image we would switch now that we have it in use.

Extremely knowledgeable staff that truly care about our business processes

CenterPoint support is excellent! While I have not had to use them frequently, as the program is consistently stable and has few, if any, bugs, the times I have had to reach out to tech support, they have been excellent and have solved our issues quickly. They listen to our explanation of the problems, can dial into our system to see exactly what we're seeing in real time, and have always been able to quickly determine the issue, work out a solution, and help us through the process until we've got everything back in line. They are friendly, courteous, professional, kind and very knowledgeable of their products. This is absolutely one of the best things about CenterPoint - even though we seldom need it, when we do, they are always quick to get us through the issue.

Incentivized

EmpCenter is a new software to the company however, I only trained on the old software for a few months before EmpCenter was introduced. I think EmpCenter has a smoother data entry process and can run more in depth reports, but since this is the system I know best I cannot accurately compare it to previous software.

We selected CenterPoint Payroll because of our dissatisfaction with ADP (and Paychex prior). We wanted a solution that we controlled internally, instead of having to be at the mercy of some huge company that saw us as a tiny fish in a big ocean. We set our company's configuration, add/define all of our own specific settings, profiles, etc. and simply process payroll. We print and sign our own checks, process our own direct deposits directly with our bank, and can handle our own business needs. When we were with ADP and Paychex before, both companies made promises to us that they simply were either unwilling or unable to fulfill. We have saved both time and money by doing our payrolls ourselves with CenterPoint.

Incentivized

• EmpCenter has reduced the amount of time administrators are spending on payroll. Certainly it has made our entry to our pay system more efficient since we can simply load the data from the time keeping system and we are not collecting actual physical signatures and paper timesheets that must be reviewed for accuracy and completeness. The system does this for us and some automatic calculating of certain pay due that we were hand adding. However the feedback I am getting is that the supervisors feel their work has been increased greatly. They are spending more time correcting and approving time. Essentially the work we were doing in our central offices to review and correct time the supervisor must now do as they approve the time. We have now asked them to be more responsible for proper reporting and use which requires they know more about the rules and many different aspects of pay than they had before. We have employees who are union represented and get some benefits from the contract others do not receive, contract employees who have certain pay aspects in their contracts that must be known, as well as temporary employees and students who get very different pay from the other employees. While some things have been programmed for the system to know and handle, some things must be added to the time sheet to pay properly or the way time is reported is different (some clock out for lunch some don't) supervisors must now know these differences while that used to be a role that was more mine as an administrator. Now I just help them and audit and review.

• CenterPoint Payroll has saved us tens of thousands of dollars from our prior arrangement with ADP, while providing either similar or superior support.
• Having payroll completely in our control has simplified a LOT of our daily routines - if something needs to be updated or adjusted, we do it ourselves instead of contacting someone at ADP and hoping that they can do it for us, then getting frustrated when they haven't.

Incentivized