Alvaria Performance vs. APS Payroll

Alvaria Performance is suited for a company that needs to provide an easy way to schedule employees, provide a general schedule to adhere to daily. Alvaria Performance is also good with creating a visual representation of scheduling data to make it easier to view in a hurry. Alvaria Performance is less suited for specific schedule adjustments, it is good for increments of 1hr or more but less useful if change requires minutes.

Incentivized

I think that APS Online is scalable to any organization. It's a wonderful product and I have had so many managers that work with me that feel the same way. We haven't been with them quite a year yet but since we've started it has made a world of difference for us. Things to ask about- 1- Do they specialize in or can they accommodate states that you are working in and their various rules? 2- What type of customer service? Do they have a call center or do they have a designated person like APS? 3- How long do your reports stay in the system? (ADP "archived" theirs after a year so we couldn't reach them)

Incentivized

• It's fast and intuitive. Our previous contractors were ADP and Paychex and neither were intuitive. Our payroll runs have less errors now than with previous vendors. Payroll prep time is down from 5 hours with ADP to 2 hours with APS for the HR Manager.
• The limiters are great. I'm always afraid of that error that no one caught. Let's assume that you add a $200 limiter to overtime. Any time that a staff member is about to receive more than $200 in overtime for that pay period, a red flag goes up for the HR manager to double check.
• We have 3 programs in public schools that block certain ports. APS has a 2nd feature using GPS so that staff can only check in for their shift while they are in the designated GPS range. Great for someone who has to report to a remote location. Just add the GPS coordinates and they can't check until they get to the project.

• Reporting - We have six different business units and the reporting is separate for all three. Most reporting I do requires information from all business units so am running six reports and then copying and pasting to get the report I need.
• Multi-state taxes - We have a number of employees who live in New York and work in New Jersey. APS OnLine is designed to accommodate one state withholding so ability to have "worked in" state and "lived in" state taxes withheld went away. This was a shortfall.
• The Carrier connection setup took much longer than expected. After a year, we are still having some issues with some items transferring over to the GL.
• The CA overtime calculation does not calculate after 8 hours per day, only on the 40 per week so we override each week.
• Reporting - when running Benefit reports, it recognizes employees who formerly carried the plan but may have dropped it. To get around this, we have to delete off the employee's record so the history is not readily available.

Incentivized

I have been using the system for over a year now and feel more comfortable with the functionality of it. I have just recently implemented the benefit administration portion.

Incentivized

In general, it's a great system to use. We were looking for simplicity and ease of use and have received raves from our employees in their ability to access and make use of the system. There is still so much more that we have yet to gain as we continue working through each of the modules.

Incentivized

I haven't had any outages

Incentivized

Very quick

Incentivized

I had to learn APS on my own, and the support team held my hand. They are still there when I have an occasional question. Anytime I need support, I can call my rep or send an email and help is on the way, without failure. The support team is awesome

Incentivized

Even if it wasn't in-person on location, we felt like we had our trainer in the room with us.

Incentivized

We had great webinars.

Incentivized

It would have been helpful to understand the phases of the implementation up front so I could have prepared differently for enrollments, billing, and transfer of information to payroll. At the end of the day, I'm happy with the selection and the system and anticipate I will like it better as we go along. We have done a number of other system implementations in the past few years, and this has been pretty painless, however, I've had a few surprises.

Incentivized

Paychex was probably the best system, but the constant shifting of support teams caused a loss of institutional knowledge every time. ADP was impersonal and support phone calls almost always went overseas. The lack of knowledge of the support service was disturbing. It was hoped that APS would provide a good system with quality support. Support normally isn't bad other than the journal entry.

Incentivized

I've never had a problem with the system nor in finding the right information.

Incentivized

• We were able to transition quickly and continue to successfully hire and onboard new hires for several Clubs that opened within weeks of moving to APS.
• We do struggle a bit with the ease of reporting simply because our locations are all under separate EIN and that can make it difficult to easily combine data queried under custom reports, so the volume of reporting that I might wish to be able to push through weekly in order to help address 'real time' trends is not always available.
• The lack of effective dating for position and wage changes does mean that HR and available APS data is not 'real time' accurate and that HR does need to return to the system to update changes well after-the-fact, which is not ideal.

Incentivized