Red Wing Software headquartered in Minnesota offers a benefits administration and payroll solution, in their software CenterPoint Payroll.
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PDS Vista
Score 6.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Vista® is a human resource, benefits, payroll, recruiting, and self-service software. Functional elements include recruitment, staffing, position and training management, compliance, and performance and compensation.
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Pricing
CenterPoint Payroll
PDS Vista
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CenterPoint Payroll
PDS Vista
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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License pricing is based on the number of full and part-time active employees within bands (e.g. 751-1,000). SaaS pricing is based on PEPM.
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.
As Vista HRMS is fully customizable to suit your needs, a company should determine if they have a current employee who can do the work themselves otherwise they will need to consider the additional cost of asking PDS to do the customizations for them. There are additional modules that we aren't currently making use of, but each company should learn about the functionality of each of them as some may be more beneficial than others. When gathering your questions, ask all potential users of the system what they would want to see in an HRMS. We did so before selecting Vista HRMS and we got pages and pages of questions and comments and made sure that each item was addressed beforehand and was something that we would be able to incorporate into the system. You have the option of taking the system in house or being a hosted client. Make sure you figure out what resources your IT department has available. If you have a dedicated administrator who will do all the upgrades and enhancements great, otherwise you may need PDS to help out and having PDS host may be a better option
Vista HRMS is very flexible, it does everything we need for HR, benefits and payroll. It’s user-friendly and intuitive to use, when we roll out new self-service items our employees have no problems and require minimal training or documentation.
PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are usually addressed within a few days. We were upgrading our production servers to Windows 2012 over a weekend and a key person in our organization was on leave. When we checked with PDS to see what cost would be involved if we needed their help, they said it was included in our regular maintenance, no extra cost.
The PDS User’s Conference is an excellent learning opportunity for training on everything Vista does, including using Crystal Reports for custom reporting. You also get to meet and talk to the executive and development staff and have direct input into the future product development.
Typical of any system built for the unknown requirements of hundreds or thousands of customers with varying needs, PDS sometimes doesn't fit our processes precisely out of the box. However, this con is far outweighed by the ability to configure and customize the system.
The most significant pet peeve of our users is the necessity for so many clicks to navigate between different areas or the system or to review applicants. These items are being addressed based on feedback from the user community in an upcoming release.
I feel so invested in Vista HRMS that I don't really want to try other options. I know we as an organization are not using this product to it's full potential and that is just due to us lacking the resources to be able to invest the time into breaking it apart and making it work to the best ability for us. The system works great as is, but there are a lot of implementations we can put into place to help us out even more. For example, we would love to start using Workflow to create more efficiencies. I personally have a very good relationship with our hosted vendor who supports Vista HRMS and can help me with any issues and concerns, this is a big part of the reason that I would renew with this product and continue to be an advocate for Vista HRMS.
The interface is intuitive, even if it does require some extra clicks to get to where you are going. The screens are consistently designed and formatted. There is a logical flow and organization to the application layout and menuing systems.
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.
PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are usually addressed within a few days
Ask lots of questions, ensure you fully understand the functionality (particularly history records) and train, train, train the users for correct and complete utilization of the system.
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.
I've used Peoplesoft HCM in the past. The products have some similarities, but they are marketed to different sized companies, so it's a bit of apples to oranges. Peoplesoft was very complex and challenging to manage and support. Vista HRMS should require fewer technical resources and still provide robust features for HR and Payroll. We selected Vista HRMS because it met the majority of our requirements and was priced to enable us to purchase and implement it within our budget. Also, it's an integrated system (although not truly one system when you count Vista Time) which is an improvement over our current state.
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.
Positive impact would definitely be self-service for both employees and managers to view and update selected data.
Through some analytics our managers are able to track turnover for their site/department by many criteria (length of service, reason, etc) and can view a number of other analytical reports such as headcount and demographics which help them to make informed decisions about their department.
