ADP WorkForce Suite vs. Planday vs. Square Shifts

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.

Planday is a wonderful first step in organizing team management, such as mass communication, scheduling, time off requests, and centralized timesheets. I used it for my retail business and found it to be extremely helpful in communication with my team and keeping track of everyone scheduling needs in one place. As we grew, I noticed a need to assign tasks, which would be very helpful for larger companies or businesses with daily tasks that need to assigned to specific team members, departments, or shifts

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

• Provides an overview of staffing levels for each team, and the department as a whole.
• The UI makes it very easy to get a snapshot view of the staffing levels for set time period.
• Managing absences and arranging for shift swaps are also efficiently handled using Planday.

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

• Holiday functionality - currently under review, new system launching early 2017 which will improve accuracy, calculate balances and deliver a more user friendly experience
• Payroll reporting - data is not all relevant, could be more flexible
• Schedule - could be more flexible to show employees consistently working across the group on one schedule

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

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.

Ultimately Planday is the perfect tool for simple straightforward team time management, communication and scheduling. I would like to see a task management feature added to Planday and perhaps some integration for employee rewards. Planday is leaps and bounds above Quickbooks Time, and TimeClock Plus but falls behind Deputy only slightly by having less features available. Overall I would recommend Planday to any small business owner with a team of 5-20

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.

• So much easier to manage than an Excel spreadsheet!
• The relatively low cost is completely outweighed by the time saved using Planday

Incentivized