Likelihood to Recommend Patriot PAY is well-suited to a company that has a 10-day window between the end of the pay period and the payday. The company size makes very little difference and it is easy to use for any company. It is also very progressive in development and improvement. If a company has a small window for turn-around, but fairly consistent payroll amounts (such as a lot of salary workers), Patriot PAY might also be a good fit for them. Companies with tight turn-around times or payrolls that vary significantly in direct deposit amounts might have difficulty using Patriot PAY.
Read full review I think it's a good platform for tracking and monitoring goals, feedback, and development. We don't use the 1:1 meeting feature, however, I can see how that would be valuable for many organizations. I do like that it is very customizable, however, that also presents problems in that sometimes forms and/or processes can be a bit challenging to create easily and quickly.
Read full review Pros It is simple, intuitive and straightforward in its design. Someone with little experience with roles in human resources roles, bookkeeping or payroll can quickly learn how to set-up the software and run payroll regularly by reading through the support portion of the site, or by contacting the helpful staff at Patriot. Patriot staff have walked me through issues or guided me on the phone as I learned how to use a function of the software. Patriot provides comprehensive quarterly tax filing records, including 941s, state unemployment compensation tax payments, state employer's tax and local employer's tax filings. You can also generate payroll or tax deposit reports over a specific time period or per employee. The support and FAQ pages available on Patriot are very practical and written in an easy to understand manner. Using the information provided there, I was able to properly set up new employees according to local and state filing requirements. Read full review 1:1 agendas are easy to create, add comments to and prompt excellent conversation flow on the topics that truly matter to the manager and the employee. The system can be easily customized to reflect your company's language and culture. We did this in several areas of the platform (goals, development, learning), and it made a world of difference in the understanding and adaptation of our users. One example is that in each learning module, we added 3 questions in the course description so that managers would be automatically prompted to ask to follow up / learning transfer questions when their employees enroll and take a learning course. Halogen support is outstanding. Any question I have had has been answered upon the first contact or within 24 hours. Read full review Cons Connecting with outside software - we have an issue of Patriot not recognizing donors when connected to other websites when all the information is the same minus a middle initial Giving an error page when something small is off. Instead of giving an easy to fix error notification, Patriot brings the user to an error page and they have to reenter everything. Fixing dates easily. If a date is entered incorrectly, 8/13/21 instead of 2021, an error pop up appears but the user has to click enter/okay many times or refresh the page in order to fix this issue. Enter vs Tab key - Patriot loves the tab key but if the user clicks enter instead, many times it brings them to the home page. Read full review My organization does not use all of the functions/modules that Halogen offers, but I find that those modules still appear on the Halogen main page. I think a great area for improvement is to hide these functions so as not to confuse employees. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It works well because it is cheap for us.
Read full review Implementing a new system and process company wide is never an easy task. We moved so quickly in such a short period of time that we were able to learn quickly but also have the opportunity to improve the Halogen experience. We will more than likely will renew our use of Halogen as we already are seeing a small impact which hopefully in the long run will lead to a greater impact
Read full review Usability I think it is great once things are setup as for general user looking to look for simple things like a copy of a paystub or a current pay rate for an employee. However, to find specialized things like a state withholding number or payroll integration settings those do require a bit more digging to find or possibly a call to customer service for help.
Read full review Halogen is very intuitive and provides very clean work-space ... lots of white space and modern layouts. There is more than one way to accomplish your action, too!
Read full review Support Rating Generally speaking it is pretty good that when I need to call somebody up for a payroll question I can generally within five minutes get somebody on the phone and they can help me resolve the problem or specify where specifically I need to go or contact to find my answers. However, that being said, for my specific situation as a partner my assigned contact has not always been very responsive.
Read full review We only purchased the appraisal module and without the other modules offered, you are really limited in what you can do and the process becomes much more involved with needing to maintain information across multiple platforms. We found that they charge for everything and call it "consulting." We poured so much money and time into a system that was just overkill for what we really needed.
Read full review Online Training It is very easy to use and I can do my own programming instead of paying a technician and waiting sometimes days for them to program the changes.
Read full review Implementation Rating Get to know your CAM - Customer Account Manager! They are a lifesaver! (Thanks Jorie Basque!)
Read full review Alternatives Considered I briefly used Intuit Online Payroll, and it was expensive, had no support, and was very frustrating to use. I also used 3 local tax companies for payroll - they were extremely expensive and messed up all of the time. Their employee turnover was very annoying (and it seemed to happen every other month) and each employee did things differently. When I let one of my employees go, the last company paid them after termination (2 weeks of salary), and had to get into a legal battle because the employee would not give the money back.
Read full review I have used other systems in the past and I like that Halogen provides everything in one space. I would like to see a more developed way to report training, not in the LMS, but I think that for the most part that Halogen is a robust system that is superior to its competition.
Read full review Return on Investment It boosts my time available for client-facing activities by not having to spend as much time processing payroll. It helps me deliver accurate reports to my CPA at tax time regarding employee wages and employer taxes. Through the online portal, I can easily track year-to-date taxes my company has paid. Read full review We are able to get our reviews done in a quicker amount of time. Instead of 4-8 weeks we were able to get it done under a month. Halogen has gotten better at given us a heads up when the system will be down. Most patches are done overnight so we can at least verify it was done, but their success rate of a patch not breaking something is not at 99%. So we do lose productivity when the system is down. The tool is easier to do so there are fewer questions from users outside the core team. Read full review ScreenShots Patriot Software Screenshots Saba TalentSpace Screenshots