Experian Employer Services vs. Optimum Solutions HRIS (discontinued)

CIC Plus was designed to set up local and state taxes for employees in the payroll system. Taxes were not being set up for work locations and there was a lot of manual entry as well as audits that had to be done to set up employees properly.

Incentivized

Optimum Solutions works very well for all our payroll needs. We run payrolls weekly, semi-monthly, monthly and yearly. The end of year process is lined out very well and webinars are available to go over any new regulations required. We haven't utilized the HR part of the software as much on the iSeries but are planning on changing that once we get converted to the Windows version later this year. The main reason for this is the HR part of the software on the iSeries is separate from payroll.

Incentivized

• CIC Plus sets up state and local taxes for employees' home addresses.
• CIC Plus is easy to use.
• CIC Plus offers an I-9 service.

Incentivized

• The setup of Optimum HRIS was intense as the software comes as a basic shell and everything is personalized to our organization. All earnings codes, leave time, employee types, job codes, taxes, etc. are set up for each company. While this was almost overwhelming at the beginning, we have so much control over the set up and better grasp of the inner workings of the system.
• Tax updates come quickly and are easily applied. This is especially welcome at year end.
• The built-in reporting is robust and offers a lot of options, but the ability to dig in to the database using SQL and Excel allows for very powerful reports that are infinitely personalized.

• CIC Plus needs to set up the local taxes for employees' home and work location.
• CIC Plus does not automatically set up taxes for a new hire unless the new hire goes to CIC Plus website and fills out the paperwork.
• CIC Plus needs to have an automatic feed for every new hire that automatically sets up ALL the home and work location taxes for the employee.

Incentivized

• When exporting reports to Excel I found the formatting to be difficult to work with and having to reformat the reports can be a nightmare. My company's IT department created its own business tools to make the reporting format more user friendly.

Incentivized

CIC Plus does not set up all the taxes that are necessary to pay employees properly and this left the employer wide open for tax penalties and interest for taxes that were not paid properly and timely.

Incentivized

CIC Plus promised us a product that would set up taxes for employees home and work location and it did not do this as promised

Incentivized

BSI Tax Profile works to set up taxes for employees Home and Work location. It works as designed and requires a lot less auditing of employees' tax set up.

Incentivized

We evaluated some payroll services but found the ongoing cost greater than the initial cost of purchasing our own software and keeping the payroll process in house. Other payroll software was generally more expensive and we are satisfied with Optimum Solutions. I would say the main reason we stayed with Optimum Solutions, converting from their iSeries version to their Windows version, was because of their outstanding staff and support.

Incentivized

• I wasn't involved in the cost aspect. I was the administrator of the CIC Plus system.
• CIC Plus caused us to owe back taxes on local taxes that were not automatically set up for employees.
• The taxes that were not paid timely had interest and penalties associated with them.

Incentivized

• More accurate payroll processing
• More accurate tax payments and reporting