Optimum Solutions, Inc. was a software development company providing Payroll, Human Resources, and Time & Attendance software for both the IBM iSeries (AS/400) and Microsoft Windows platforms or in the cloud. In October 2019 they were acquired by Kronos, Inc (now UKG after merging with Ultimate Software). Former Optimum products are now supported by Kronos / UKG, and are no longer sold available for sale.
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Netchex
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Netchex is a HR, payroll, and tax administration software platform with solutions dedicated to recruitment, hiring, and onboarding as well as payroll, tax compliance, HR, time/attendance, benefits management, and analytics for these areas.
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.
Netchex is great if you want to log in to one place to take care of all things employee-related. It is especially helpful if you have multiple locations or divisions as you can easily set these up and manage them as needed. The more employees you have, the more you will benefit from a program like Netchex that provides so much support for your business. Our company has multiple locations of stores and many employee position levels and Netchex has been great at keeping all of this simple when a lessor product could make it much more complicated. Netchex would not be as appropriate if you have a very small business or a simple payroll structure. It would definitely still work well for you, it would just be more sophisticated than you would require.
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.
My Netchex Service Team is very responsive and friendly. They are willing and able to spend the amount of time needed on one call to troubleshoot most problems or answer questions.
Their recent updates to the employee dashboard have been well-received by our seasonal team. Employees are able to quickly find what they are looking for which has minimized the amount of requests that my team receives regarding questions on pay or updating personal information.
Online W-2 forms have been a game-changer for us since moving to Netchex. Our staff tend to move around a lot and most do not get the mailed copy of their W-2. The electronic consent has saved me hours and hours of time.
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.
SOME CUST SVC REPS MAY NEED ADDITIONAL TRAINING ON WORK AROUNDS
WOULD PREFER TO CHAT WITH SOMEONE, SOMETIMES WORDS IN TEXT COULD BE MISINTERPRETED. ALSO SPEAKING TO SOMEONE IS ALWAYS A POSITIVE
NOT REALLY ANYTHING ELSE BUT HAVE BEEN USING THEM 3 MONTHS SO NOT LONG INTO IT.....VERY EASY SYSTEM AND LOVE I CAN DO A NEGATIVE INSTEAD OF HAVING TO CALL AND ASK THEM TO DO IT ON THEIR END.
The first line CE team is phenomenal. They are helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable. We have had less luck with the responsiveness of the tax department. However, their response time has improved drastically over the past year.
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.
I like that they are not so big that they ignore the small customers. They are also reasonably priced. Their support is excellent, I had worked with ADP in a prior position, and we did not have the same kind of support
Associates can easily access their data and make changes to things like their address and direct deposit, saving manager time to focus on more critical tasks within the organization
NetRecruitier has one site that can be posted to multiple job boards with one applicant tracking system
Electronic Onboarding allows us to get information out to the new employee so we can start with expectations on their first day and they know what to expect.