Planday vs. Square Shifts vs. UKG Ready

Planday is a wonderful first step in organizing team management, such as mass communication, scheduling, time off requests, and centralized timesheets. I used it for my retail business and found it to be extremely helpful in communication with my team and keeping track of everyone scheduling needs in one place. As we grew, I noticed a need to assign tasks, which would be very helpful for larger companies or businesses with daily tasks that need to assigned to specific team members, departments, or shifts

Incentivized

I might recommend UKG to a larger organization than ours. The complexity is rich, but perhaps it is too powerful a tool for what we need. That or it's a bit messy in its construction, having so many tools available but difficult to find or not working appropriately. UKG Ready processes payroll efficiently and with ease, but unless you are using a simple accounting platform it may not be able to easily integrate with yours

Incentivized

• Provides an overview of staffing levels for each team, and the department as a whole.
• The UI makes it very easy to get a snapshot view of the staffing levels for set time period.
• Managing absences and arranging for shift swaps are also efficiently handled using Planday.

Incentivized

• Support—UKG support, from the Account Managers to CSMs to Ready Support, is amazing. They are always willing to help!
• Documentation—UKG has built-in online documentation, which is a live, easy-to-use version of a very lengthy manual.
• Ease of use- the system is intuitive, easy to train others to use.

Incentivized

• Holiday functionality - currently under review, new system launching early 2017 which will improve accuracy, calculate balances and deliver a more user friendly experience
• Payroll reporting - data is not all relevant, could be more flexible
• Schedule - could be more flexible to show employees consistently working across the group on one schedule

• We have had ongoing issues with our accruals.
• Auto generate timesheets in the "Team Timesheets" view.
• Granting manager access is cumbersome - access needs to be given in multiple places.
• The sync between Pro and Ready in my opinion is terrible and needs much improvement.
• Auto assign Employee Time Zones based on work location.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

UKG is the platform with the best overall usability on both an admin and user side. Employees find it easy to update personal information, the dashboards are clear and easy to follow, and the navigation of it is also easy to follow. Overall my favorite platform to use and learn more about.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Pretty good online training, you have many how to options and can watch them several times. It can be hard at times to dig through the amount of data online but can usually find what you are looking for. Also you can download documentation for setting up the profiles and policies.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Ultimately Planday is the perfect tool for simple straightforward team time management, communication and scheduling. I would like to see a task management feature added to Planday and perhaps some integration for employee rewards. Planday is leaps and bounds above Quickbooks Time, and TimeClock Plus but falls behind Deputy only slightly by having less features available. Overall I would recommend Planday to any small business owner with a team of 5-20

Incentivized

We currently use Paycom and are extremely dissatisfied with the lack of functionality and poor customer service. Rippling and ADP were other vendors we evaluated who performed well and offer a lot of functionality but we decided UKG was the best fit for our needs now and to scale with our strategic growth plans.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• So much easier to manage than an Excel spreadsheet!
• The relatively low cost is completely outweighed by the time saved using Planday

Incentivized

• This is basic, but we finally know how many employees we have! It sounds ridiculous, but prior to UKG Ready we were on a payroll system that's reports were only as accurate as the last payroll cycle, so they were always 2 weeks behind and static. UKG Ready allows for realtime, daily reporting of information.
• We are able to get salary data for our various locations to be able to compare them to each other, as well as across our "competitors" and external competition.
• The data provided allows us to be able to understand the trends at individual locations including attrition, advancement, raise information, and other data points that we haven't historically done comparisons on
• We can see the demographic and geographical information for our employees and the benefits that they elect