Paylocity vs. UKG Ready

Paylocity is well suited for onboarding, keeping employee data, payroll, communication with carrier sites, payroll updates, timekeeping, adding holidays, and hosting our employee handbook. I wish that the reporting were easier to use; I find it hard to run reports on specific information that is located and housed in Paylocity. Submitting time cards and those approvals are easy. I think that some of the items/procedures our company has don't match up exactly with how Paylocity is set up.

UKG Ready offers a solid full-suite solution at a reasonable price that addresses our growing company's needs. The platform is very user-friendly, and their mobile app was well received throughout our workforce. They offer robust reporting capability throughout the portals, which makes it easy to report on. My sales rep was quick to address my needs, and their implementation team is very hands on and easy to work with. We recently rolled UKG Ready out to our company, and the adaption rate of our employees to grasp clocking in and out and navigating the system was exceptional. All in all, from an ROI perspective, I am very pleased with my choice in partnering with UKG and feel this solution will carry us for many years of anticipated growth ahead.

• Customer Support. While I have not and typically don’t speak with our actual account exec. Going through the support line is easy and I’m usually connected very quickly.
• User experience is simple and easy. Employees are able to navigate through the site with little guidance and it’s very intuitive
• Onboarding is easy to navigate and easily automated.

• Reporting
• Consistency of UI across each different area of the program, makes learning easier.
• Support has been effective, quick, and they actually teach you HOW to do things so you don't need to ask for help the next time! The recaps that support provides after walking you through anything (for me this was building shift incentives) are extremely helpful.
• Communication and training about updates.

• Recruiting - the ability to add candidates manually in a fast and easy way and we approach a lot of passive candidates
• Recruiting - I would like to be able to add candidates to folders to build a pipeline.
• Recruiting - It would be very helpful if we could add tags to candidates ie. experience in x field, bilingual, etc. to be able to search for candidates in the future based on the tags assigned
• Onboarding - I would like for the onboarding process to go beyond the hire date i.e. Tasks the new hire was to complete in their first 90 days in order for us to keep track

• Recruitment module is clunky for hiring managers, people who are not administrators.
• Some of the setups don't make sense when administering - for example managing multiple pay rates.
• Some of our integrations do not work properly and it is difficult to get a UKG Ready person to work through it with the 3rd party partner.

The transition from my old provider to Paylocity was virtually painless. I always felt well supported by my account rep. I would use Paylocity again, but I'm not in a position to change providers at my current company right now.

We plan to renew our support and use of UKG Ready each year unless it becomes unavailable or the district seeks another vendor. As of now, there are no plans to changes vendors. The district staff is now familiar with using UKG. Another vendor will need to meet the same expectations we have come to enjoy with using UKG

Although it is fairly easy to use, there are some processes that just don't make munch sense. For example, if an employee has 2 bank accounts and the funds are returned from one account the process to reissue is TEDIOUS and confusing. Unless you want to PAY for Paylocity to do it for you. I think the manual process should be as easy for us.

The improvements have made some of my previous challenges easier...the new layout definitely makes it easier and you can toggle between different views. Some of the new features in recruitment have made things easier for our hiring managers...they really seem to like these features.

Solid network - down for upgrades at late hours during the weekend when I am definitely not in the system to use it. Even if I was, they provide excellent advance notice.

The system seems very stable. Being hosted in the cloud, we are vulnerable to internet speeds and busy times. The system has been down a couple times over the 3 months we have been live, but Kronos resolved the issues very quickly. To have access from a desktop, tablet, time clock, or phone app is one of the best features....users have almost NO REASON they can't clock in.

It's so manual, not automated or intuitive.

We were always told that Kronos was the best, but there are reports that we got out of ADP and other payroll providers that we cannot get out of Kronos. One example is a report of Productive/Non-productive hours by department. We also need the dollar amount associated with the hours. This is information that is required on our cost report and we were told that that report is unavailable. It is very frustrating when I can't get what I need.

The frustrations I have with Paylocity customer support are what drove me to leave a review in the first place so I can warn anyone considering purchasing this product. I really like the software and it has a lot of great features, but my complete distrust of their customer service has led me to rue the day I chose Paylocity to be our payroll vendor. For one thing, they are often slow to respond. That alone might be manageable, except even when I do get a response, half the time the answers are incomplete/not helpful, if not completely incorrect! Imagine waiting 90 days and paying thousands of dollars for a corrected W2 only for it to come back more incorrect than it was when you started, and not only that but they also made me question my sanity trying to convince me that they were correct when it was BLATANTLY wrong - and that's just one example! Sometimes you might be lucky to get a decent customer service rep using the chat help feature, but most of the time whoever you talk to does not seem to have any more knowledge of the system than you do. I am a patient person and I have a lot of grace for administrative errors (we're all human) but Paylocity customer service is consistently unreliable and sometimes unprofessional to boot. To their credit, the sales and implementation teams do seem really good. It seems like maybe they just can't retain good customer service reps. We've been through several account managers without ever having a good experience.

If I was only rating support itself that would be a 10. Every support case I have entered has been addressed efficiently and with the desired result. On the implementation and transition to support there were multiple issues that those doing the implementation or transition could not answer or workflows and various settings left undone only to be discovered later. We implemented 3 different modules and the expertise we got for each one varied widely.

Our in-person training was a hybrid. Live online training with an instructor. They were very knowledgeable of the product & the area they were training on. I asked several specific questions and if they didn't know the answer immediately they followed up after class.

They have great training tools!

Lots & lots of training available. Timing was wrong for our organization. We had lengthy down time in the beginning while the implementation consultant setup our system. We did online training then. Difficult to train on a generic system setup that isn't your industry and hard to understand what you are learning how to do w/o actually being in your system. Online training was well documented and the instructors were very knowledgeable.

I would make sure you have a dedicated team at Paylocity to complete the implementation. We had staff from Paylocity quit and things were not completed properly. They dropped the ball so to speak on that portion of it. we have encountered multiple issues since then and are still not using the Time off tracking to its full capabilities.

Make sure the people who are doing the build have extensive knowledge on employment law and asking the right questions. I would bet that the people who helped with our builds did not read any of our employment contracts or ordinances; and when I asked questions about how other companies handled certain basic dictates from federal employment laws, they didn't have any idea what FMLA, FLSA, etc were.

I would recommend PayStubz over Paylocity any day, but they have been purchased by BerganKDV and I'm unsure whether the product is the same any longer. We evaluated PayChex and now wish we would have selected their product instead of Paylocity, though we were put off by the cost of their timekeeping solution.

Our organization was a long-time user of UKG Telestaff and we found that the ADT payroll services did not integrate easily for payroll processing and management. The success we experienced with UKG Telestaff (formerly Kronos) made the decision easy to continue with their products, like UKG Ready, when our organization separated from local government and became a stand-alone entity. UKG Ready's integration did not come without issues by any means, however, the build and integration teams (on both sides) were able to cooperate and work through all the problems encountered.

Thus far we are able to add as many users as necessary, implement 3 different bargaining units, 5 different types of user groups. Very flexible.

• Paylocity's poor service levels in the development of our PTO policies have INCREASED the time needed to manage the process exponentially and significantly DECREASED HR's credibility in the organization.
• Benefits management is a disaster. We've been working for months on a reimbursement issue with the COBRA team that will result in us changing vendors.
• Payroll processing is efficient and allows for necessary manual adjustments and the need for on-demand payrolls.

• Positive: We have had better reporting with UKG Ready.
• Negative: We still have no benefit integration with our external benefit administrator after 2 years on the UKG Ready Platform. The first attempt that took 2 years failed and now UKG wants us to pay for a single directional integration. This has cost excessive staff hours for manual intervention.
• Negative: Any payroll adjustment requirements are not easy and the UKG Process is outdated. We recently had a payroll issue and were forced to issue a 2nd payroll but the payroll was delayed because UKG cannot (will not) process the same day. This is unacceptable and since Kronos and Ultimate Software merged, Ultimate software was able to process same day as are many other payroll companies that do not have as much power as UKG Ready does.
• Positive: We are able to use position management for better budgeting. There could be some upgrades to this module, but it does do what was promised.
• Negative: Quarterly and year-end closeouts are 3rd business days, which is not always possible. Very inflexible in regards to this. Even when it is done timely, we get random notices and charges that it was not done even though we can prove it was.
• Positive: It appears customer service is getting better. We struggled at first, but lately, it seems better.