Likelihood to Recommend EmpCenter is really well suited for companies with minimal variety in time keeping needs. Certainly somewhere that has fairly regular work schedules and operational needs the system would be programmed for and meet those needs quite well. I think they assert themselves as a product specifically for those more complex companies, and I believe it is one of a few products available for companies with many employee types and complex work schedule and pay needs, but because of those complexities each have their own specific customizations I feel it is difficult for the company to then manage the different products that end up existing. Each ends up being unique so applying large scale changes doesn't work well as something we may request and need if applied over EmpCenter in general may cause problems for another company. Therefore everything has to be done on an individual basis and is more time consuming and costly.
Traci Yates Auxiliaries and Activities Business Center Payroll Coordinator
Read full review We haven't found another system that can do all that Shortlist can do (payments, tax paperwork, profile management, project management, on-boarding, etc...) but it doesn't mean we always love using Shortlist. Shortlist is cumbersome to work in and requires LOTS of redundant clicking. Something as simple as being able to right-click to open on any profile/page/account/link would save hours in a week where as now to get to two side-by-side items on some lists, you have to click back a page, re-load, and scroll down to select the next option. I appreciate that Shortlist manages all the tax paperwork and has created for us a on-boarding system that flows nicely and allows multiple team members to manage their piece of the process.
Read full review Pros A lot flexibility in configuration of the system works well with other systems. We were able to collect data from another time system, Avaya phone systems and even a point of sale system with not a lot of difficulty. They know their product and integration points. They were able to troubleshoot problems with hardware time collection devices quite quickly. We found the devices they sold to be quite durable. Out of the box they have more reports than I would have anticipated. Creating new reports was sometimes a task if it was complex but there were usually similar reports you could use as a starter template Read full review Shortlist allows us to pay our freelancers without having to personally manage the back end paperwork of payroll Shortlist handles all the year end tax paperwork creation and distribution Read full review Cons Difficult to use Retroactive adjustments must be made by an administrator Delegation of duties must be done by an adminstrator Data must be exported and then imported into pay system, does not support interface Product has not changed or been updated in 4+ years Read full review Shortlist only allows for minor customizations to their platform. It would be great if each company could create their own view/usage set for the system. The help chat box needs some work for sure. It takes days for someone to respond if they ever respond and often there is nothing they can do to remedy the issue at hand. Payments should be able to be made every day, not just on Fridays. Read full review Likelihood to Renew After spending close to 5 years to decide on which payroll product to acquire for our University, I cannot image we would switch now that we have it in use.
Read full review Support Rating Extremely knowledgeable staff that truly care about our business processes
Read full review 30-40% of the time there is no response when you contact the chat/help feature. 30-40% of the time if they do respond, it is to say they can't do anything about the issue. Maybe 20% of the time the chat is actually helpful, but that seems like a high estimate when I think about my experience asking for support.
Read full review Alternatives Considered EmpCenter is a new software to the company however, I only trained on the old software for a few months before EmpCenter was introduced. I think EmpCenter has a smoother data entry process and can run more in depth reports, but since this is the system I know best I cannot accurately compare it to previous software.
Read full review We've never found another platform that does exactly what Shortlist does in terms of payments, taxes, project management, and on-boarding. We use other sites to source our new vendors (like
Indeed , craigslist, etc...) but ultimately we direct all those applicants to our onboarding in Shortlist. I wish some of the more "minor" platform issues we've had over the last year were fixed sooner (or fixed at all) but it does the job!
Read full review Return on Investment EmpCenter has reduced the amount of time administrators are spending on payroll. Certainly it has made our entry to our pay system more efficient since we can simply load the data from the time keeping system and we are not collecting actual physical signatures and paper timesheets that must be reviewed for accuracy and completeness. The system does this for us and some automatic calculating of certain pay due that we were hand adding. However the feedback I am getting is that the supervisors feel their work has been increased greatly. They are spending more time correcting and approving time. Essentially the work we were doing in our central offices to review and correct time the supervisor must now do as they approve the time. We have now asked them to be more responsible for proper reporting and use which requires they know more about the rules and many different aspects of pay than they had before. We have employees who are union represented and get some benefits from the contract others do not receive, contract employees who have certain pay aspects in their contracts that must be known, as well as temporary employees and students who get very different pay from the other employees. While some things have been programmed for the system to know and handle, some things must be added to the time sheet to pay properly or the way time is reported is different (some clock out for lunch some don't) supervisors must now know these differences while that used to be a role that was more mine as an administrator. Now I just help them and audit and review. Traci Yates Auxiliaries and Activities Business Center Payroll Coordinator
Read full review Shortlist allows us to pay people and provide tax information which is a positive. Shortlist doesn't integrate with many other platforms which causes us huge delays in employee work time which is a negative. Read full review ScreenShots WorkForce Suite Screenshots