BrightHR vs. Namely

I feel Bright HR is well suited to most small/medium sized businesses where they have a 'straight' forward resource set up. For larger businesses or for complex businesses similar to ourselves, where we operate 24 hours per day, rotational shift patterns, ambulatory staff, locums etc...we have to 'fudge' the way we use the information sometimes to make it work for us.

Incentivized

Namely is aesthetically very pleasing and navigates like other social media platforms which can be appealing to potentially a remote workforce who interacts more online than in person. Unfortunately, it did not serve our population well as we are primarily manufacturing where people are not as interested in utilizing the HRIS for interactions when they would rather connect in person.

• BLIP is working very well. Staff find it easy to use and the geo-fencing that can be set up is very useful.
• Reporting, in particular reporting of Absence. We run this monthly and the information we can download is flexible and useful.
• Sick analysis - helps in controlling absence.
• Holiday planning and authorization is very helpful and details including date booked helps manage requests.

Incentivized

• Namely has helped with our COVID sick leave response. It has made a major difference both with the weekly payroll and the 941 tax filing
• Keeping track of our multiple PTO plans. Thank goodness for Namely, I have shredded my old PTO spreadsheets.
• Employees like the convenience of the cell phone app. As a payroll administrator, I like the Geo Tracking tool where I can see where some are when the clock is in or out.
• The flexibility inside of the payroll system both as you are finalizing an employee profile and when you are processing payroll is a major advantage.
• The reports I get out of Namely in Excel format work well for me.

Incentivized

• Notifications for requests should be optional based on individual employees. For example an admin won’t necessarily want every staff members leave requests by email and push notification. The settings only currently allow for notifications for everyone or no one. Being assigned as a manager may not allow data viewing required of wider staff.
• Toil should automatically be accrued into a balance if the employees clocked in time amounts to more than the target hours. It shouldn’t have to be calculated and requested.
• When reviewing hours worked for the week, the history calculation should take into account approved leave and sickness etc. I have a staff members target of 37 hours, but if their hours show 29 hours worked then I have to work out why they worked less. It should account for this if the absence is approved.

• Limits to custom reporting
• No direct feed for Ohio Workers Comp (now a manual process on our end)
• No option to place an employee on Leave of Absence and exclude them from payroll while they are "inactive"
• No option to suppress certain deductions for certain pay types (i.e. allow 401K for commissions but block remaining deductions - also now a manual process to uncheck the suppress box for 401K for each commission check)

Incentivized

It's not entirely my decision - we are members of a 'community' of veterinary practices who have signed up to the contract with pensinusla and have bright hr as part of that contract however, I am usually involved in the tender process as I am one of the biggest users of both bright hr and the services from peninsula

Incentivized

Administrators and employees love Namely. It is very easy to use and streamlined. Employees stay engaged with news feed updates and enjoy all the self service options. The time cards are very easy to access and clocking in and out for non-exempt employees is a breeze. Namely is part of our family.

Great modern interface and mostly intuitive but feels like it needs a bit more functionality or improvement to be truly intuitive. For example, you get a notification that you have an overtime request, you click it and it doesn't take you to the page where you can authorize the request and when you do navigate to the right place and action the request, you still have to go back to notifications and mark the request as complete and remove it.

It is very simple to use for myself, the HR team, and our employees. I find the payroll process very user-friendly. Reporting is simple to navigate and produce the required information requested. I know our employees enjoy the self-service feature and use it on a regular basis, which saves me time.

Incentivized

The team are proactive, having an advocacy team is just amazing and a great way to really understand their product roadmap and have input into useful features or feedback

Incentivized

Namely platform has pretty good support: knowledgeable and relatively fast response times. Namely Payroll and Namely Benefits are very much depending on the quality of the support agent or CSM: we have had knowledgeable and attentive ones, but also ones that have provided erroneous information or failed to respond to urgent asks in a timely manner

Incentivized

it was fairly easy to do but timely as i had to enter everything from scratch - i didn't at the time realise how important it was to set up the variable or fixed working pattern correctly given future changes as this is very tricky once it has been set up and i wished i had been aware that sometimes you can't make future changes without deleting the whole profile and starting again

Incentivized

Implementation was a bit complicated and our company had to carry most of the weight. It often felt like our implementation manager was giving us extra work that she did not want to do herself. It also took much longer than expected - I believe almost 2 months. I believe our company carried a bit too much of the weight.

Incentivized

I chose BrightHR as it offered a one-stop platform for HR management for which we have dedicated UK and ROI HR specialists who not only give HR advice but also write policies and handbooks, etc. They are a one-stop-shop, which was very important as when I signed the contract I did not have an HR person in my team and they were essentially my back office. Also, by signing up, I got access to Bright Safe too; which is great as again it's a one-stop-shop for Health and Safety in the workplace. So I can roll out toolbox talks, training, and accident management.

Incentivized

The reason I continued to choose Namely at multiple employers is due to the continuity of employee experience. And the features have continued to grow since I initially onboarded in 2014. Also, through the years, I have had terrific benefits teams. The customer service has been the worst part of the experience outside of the benefits team.

Incentivized

• Able to reduce one member of staff in personnel from 5 days to 3 days.
• Able to reduce time spent by payroll on holiday records significantly and improve accuracy significantly.
• Able to improve control of sick absence and improve record keeping.
• BLIP meant we did not need to buy expensive attendance software.
• Looking at possible use of payroll and other aspects of Bright HR not used at present.

Incentivized

• We were able to transition to a fully digital onboarding process which saved us hours in time per new hire and made the process smoother for the new hire.
• Namely is our first HRIS and has helped the HR department to find data and information quickly.
• Namely helped us digitize our performance management process which the company undergoes on an annual basis.

Incentivized