The Good and the Bad!
We use Ascentis HR for our "system of record", ESS, open enrollment, etc. We are just starting to learn and use Performance Management, …
Overview
What is Ascentis (discontinued)?
Ascentis HR uses web-based management programs to help automate complex HR processes. Ascentis’ other services included customizable payroll, time and attendance and recruiting modules. Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022, and will be discontinued.
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What is Ascentis (discontinued)?
Ascentis HR uses web-based management programs to help automate complex HR processes. Ascentis’ other services included customizable payroll, time and attendance and recruiting modules. Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022, and will be discontinued.
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What is ADP Workforce Now?
ADP Workforce Now is a cloud-based HR platform for mid-sized businesses. It features customizable modules of various HR services that businesses can tailor to their specific needs, as well as regulatory monitoring and alerts to help businesses remain compliant.
What is Rippling?
Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. This enables users to manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single…
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What is Ascentis (discontinued)?
Ascentis was an a-la carte full suite workforce management (WFM) technology platform and human capital solutions. Ascentis WFM provided time and attendance solutions that provided clients with scheduling, compliance, complex calculations, and time collection options. The HCM suite, included a fully a-la carte solution.
Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022. The service will be discontinued.
Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022. The service will be discontinued.
Ascentis (discontinued) Screenshots
Ascentis (discontinued) Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Ascentis HR uses web-based management programs to help automate complex HR processes. Ascentis’ other services included customizable payroll, time and attendance and recruiting modules. Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022, and will be discontinued.
Reviewers rate Direct deposit files highest, with a score of 9.2.
The most common users of Ascentis (discontinued) are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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(323)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(101-125 of 164)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 17, 2018
Ascentis HR Streamlines and Organizes
It is being used across the organization. It solved the problem of employee records management and hiring process streamlining.
- Captures the employee's history
- Manages the document storage
- Handling an employee that has two roles within an organization that require different settings
- Rounding of salaries and hourly wages when passing from HR to Payroll to timing keeper.
April 16, 2018
Ascentis is a Gift to HR Professionals Everywhere!
We are using Ascentis across the organization. We started with the basic HR and Payroll system and have been focused on building additional modules (which were all included with our package) for Recruitment and Performance Management. The business problems it addressed were :
1. Self service to employee info
2. Benefits enrollment
3. Central "intranet" for employees to read info
4. Lack of organized reviews and goal tracking
5. Recruitment centralization
1. Self service to employee info
2. Benefits enrollment
3. Central "intranet" for employees to read info
4. Lack of organized reviews and goal tracking
5. Recruitment centralization
- Implementation - You work one on one with a specialist to help build and customize each module. They are patient, supportive, and very helpful.
- Customization - There were few (if any) things I asked for that couldn't be customized. They really do work with you to make the system work for you.
- Support - If/when an issue arises, you are met with immediate response and rectification. Their dedication to customer service is great.
- Remote Desktop - Logging in via remote desktop can be a bit cumbersome. I understand they are working towards a web-based application which I can't wait to see.
- Electronic data transfer - One of the reasons we wanted to use Ascentis was to take advantage of automatic transition to our benefits carriers. We are 6 months in and still having issues. For example, the feed that goes to our COBRA provider every Friday keeps going over in an encrypted manner in which our provider cannot accept. Despite many communications between them, they resolve one week and go back to the same encryption the following week. As a result, I have to double check the things that should be "automatic".
April 13, 2018
Ascentis Experience
Ascentis HR is currently used as our Human Resources Info System. It houses all employee info including employment status and dates, benefits, demographics, educational programs, leave of absence, bonuses, and tracks pay, but is not our payroll system. All the information is primarily entered and updated by HR Analytics, but is available to view and request updates by all employees across the company. It's also the system all companies use to make benefit selections during open enrollment.
- Customizable. The system can add new tabs and custom fields to all employee records that can then be reported on.
- You can create custom reports (although not the easiest to do), and then save the reports you'll need again for future use so you don't have to re-create the report every time, just run it as needed for updated information.
- It's a secure system. We've never experienced any data breeches of any of our employee information from the system.
- Support - there are so many tiers of support and many of them know only the basic "how to"s of the system. For more complicated requests, it takes several layers of support to get to the right person that may or may not know the answer.
- Integration with other systems could be way better. We ran into MANY issues trying to keep our employee data up to date because of the limited integration capabilities. Payroll system info didn't match Ascent employee info which didn't match our LMS data, etc.
April 13, 2018
Disappointed in this HRIS
We implemented Ascentis HR in November of 2017 and currently use it across the organization as our HRIS and ATS systems. Our entire organization uses the Employee Self Service Portal, Performance Management, Timekeeping and Recruiting. Our HR department utilizes it for Recruiting and all other programs. Our Payroll department stayed with ADP when we made the transition to Ascentis.
- Recruiting-Posting positions and pulling job descriptions from the JD library is easy to do
- Onboarding- this is a one-stop shop for onboarding! I love that the applicant can sign all new hire paperwork through the system before they are hired
- Employee Self Service Portal-love the widgets!
- Implementation- when going through each phase of implementation, we felt like the implementation rep would run us through their program and immediately toss us over to support, whether we were ready or not.
- Training- We needed MUCH more training than we received during implementation. This was a HUGE disappointment to us.
April 06, 2018
Got Ascentis!
Ascentis HR is being used as part of our total HRIS. As a relatively new user, in addition to HR, we're implementing recruiting, onboarding, performance, and a learning management system. Having everything under one umbrella solves the problem of having multiple systems to manage people.
- Ascentis HR is easy to use.
- In addition to standard reports, Ascentis HR allows you to create special/custom reports.
- Customer support is very attentive to responding to new user questions.
- Using many features of Ascentis (performance, LMS, recruiting, onboarding), the HR portion has a separate log in from the employee self-service portal. I would like a single sign-in feature.
- I would like to see my employees be able to access company documents relative to HR such as an employee handbook.
April 06, 2018
Ascentis Product Review
We use Ascentis daily for Employee tracking: Personal, job, training, benefit and salary information. We use it to search for information, track employee details and run reports for our various County purposes.
- User friendly screens that make it easy for someone new to learn Ascentis
- Great reporting features; you can create reports to pull information for any needs
- Plenty of webinars to help you learn new skills
- Email support; not very responsive on emails (phone support is great, though)
- I am new to this department and I have heard that our service rep for our group is not very responsive to our needs
- There were issues with passwords and them linking, but the phone support group has been able to help clean this up for us.
April 06, 2018
Ascentis Review
It is used for open enrollment of benefits and employees may use to update changes in their benefits. However, we then must take those changes and input them into another payroll system which payroll is prepared from.
- Ease of use for employees
- Identifies the person making the change and the date
- Works well with our benefit set up
- Report running-need to start over again when wanting an excel and PDF form
- would like to see list of benefits on one page instead of several
April 06, 2018
Ascentis HR
For benefits administration, ACA, EEO, salary and wage administration, EE self service and interface to Ascentis Payroll.
- Workflow. Ability for managers to update terminations and wage changes easily and then have it go to CEO and CFO for final review and approval. Has good approval documentation.
- No mobile app for self service
- Have to use terminal server and web interfaces
- Benefits does not handle age banding well
- HR doesn’t tell payroll when to start 401k match
April 06, 2018
Ascentis HR Review
It's being used for HRI data management and benefits administration. It's only being used in North America. The business problems it addresses are benefits administration, HR personnel record keeping which feeds into our payroll system.
- ACA Reporting once you figure out the process is fairly simple.
- Ability to edit company info and add departments etc.
- Overall user experience is very clunky - it appears like it's old software, there's often a lot of steps involved to do a task that could be set up in a much simpler way.
- The system can be unreliable - would prefer it was fully web-based rather than web and remote desktop.
April 03, 2018
If I were to grade Ascentis, I'd give it a C.
Ascentis is being utilized across the entire organization. We have rolled-out the HR and Payroll functions and are in the midst of rolling-out the other functionalities. It has helped us automate and streamline some of our processes.
- Reporting capabilities are intuitive. Easy to manage and use.
- Assisted in helping us automate our former paper/excel process. More accuracy.
- Dedicated Project Manager throughout the entire process.
- Support never answers the phone. You always have to leave a message and they will "attempt" to call you back within 48 hours. Your hand is held for a while but ultimately, you're on your own afterwards. Good luck trying to remember something you did a year ago like Open Enrollment.
- Everything is self-service which is time-consuming and processes to complete modules is cumbersome.
- Things that should be default within the system are said to be "custom" and therefore an additional fee is involved. This adds up.
March 29, 2018
Saves time! Easy to use!!
Ascentis helps in managing different sectors of the business. Compiles all the record and is a great database.
Payroll across all division can be easily validated with its great reporting tool. Needless to say, the support team is great.
Payroll across all division can be easily validated with its great reporting tool. Needless to say, the support team is great.
- Running the payroll and one time exceptions easily. Easy to manage
- The support team is great
- Database have structured reporting tier
- Sometimes it takes too much time to process and throws us out of the system
March 29, 2018
OK Computer...You Didn’t Learn That In School
We are currently using Ascentis HR across our whole organization. However, for the majority of our employees, they are mainly using only the Employee Portal/Employee Self-Service site so that they can see their paychecks, make simple changes to demographic information to their HR records, and changes some of their payroll information such as W4 withholdings as well as direct deposit changes. Our managers are granted a bit more access and can see some basic demographic information as well as compensation and job history. This aids them when doing reviews, job transfers, and in essence, gives them a little more information at their fingertips without having to dig through files or try to remember at the top of their head the history of each employee. Our payroll department utilizes it somewhat; however, not nearly as much as our HR department which is the department that accesses it and engages in it every day.
- Ascentis HR is particularly helpful in keeping a record of past jobs and/or managers. If you have an organization that lets employees move from one department to another fairly often, this software has a tool that will help you keep track when Employee "A" moved from Supervisor "X" to Supervisor "Y" as well as from Department "B" to Department "F" without having to restart that employees length of service.
- Ascentis HR also has a number of ways that you can customize tabs. If you want to keep track of something for your organization that you don't see on one of their prefabricated tabs or screens you can make one of your own. We have made several different ones to help us keep track of different information such as driver's licenses and expiration dates as well as specific training and/or orientation tasks that we want supervisors to accomplish with their new employees.
- Ascentis HR lets you upload documents (particularly pdf) to employees files, which is particularly helpful. Additionally, you can mark these so that the employee can or cannot see them when they log onto their side of the Employee Self Service. One of the things I particularly like about these uploaded documents is that each part cluster of tabs has its own tab for attachments. When you open the "Employee" section where you find information about the employee and his/her personal information as well as job information, you will also find a tab where you can put attachments for personal and/or job-related information - such as a job description sign off or something of the like. When you open the "Compensation" section you will find another tab for attachments, and this might be where you decide to upload copies of direct deposits if you require them or wage changes.
- One of the biggest issues I have had with Ascentis HR is that it lacks updates. We started using it four years ago. We stopped using it because we were trying to piecemeal three different systems together. We tried another system for two and a half years. That didn't work out any better. We decided to give Ascentis HR another try. I was hoping that there would be a few upgrades, but the system was largely the same. On the one hand, I admit it was nice because there was not a steep learning curve, but on the other, the technology was behind a lot of the other systems that we were presented with.
- The complaint that I hear the most from my employees is that there is no app for the program and that it is extremely hard to use on any mobile device. The Employee Self Service/Portal is set to be used on a computer or laptop - not a small mobile device. With so many people using their phones as the main internet source, it does make it difficult for many of our employees to access their self-service portal outside of the work environment.
- Because it is an older system, some of the things can be a little trickier to set up. Benefits are one of them. There are multiple screens that need to be gone through and rules that need to be built. It can seem a little like a choose-your-own-adventure at times. If you don't hit the correct button on the right page, you may miss out on options down the road. There is no real safeguard built in and no particular view mode to see if things were done correctly. You have to make things "live" in order to see if your rules and the benefits worked. In addition, once the benefits have been set up correctly for the employees, it still has to be mapped and moved over for payroll to be able to see things.
- Currently, we are using their remote desktop service which requires us to move anything we want to put on our Employee's Self Service Portal from our desktops to their remote desktops and then copying the correct path to bring it back to our online version of an old MySpace page. I know that they are trying, but it seems as though it is a lot of work for something that should be a lot easier to do with a few more layout and posting options.
- Although they do have some canned reports, most of the reporting functions take time to learn and is best done when one understands how to write Custom Reports to get the information that one is seeking. The Customer Service Reps are usually more than happy to help, but it does take time to explain just what you are looking for and how to make it into a report that would help you. Overall, I think that the structure of the reporting function is solid; however, the user-friendliness of it is not.
We currently use Ascentis HR for benefits enrollment and tracking. It is our full-service HRIS. The self-service capabilities have allowed all our employees to access and update their profiles in real time. It is great to finally have a tool that contours to the needs of your business. The ability to build customized tabs has been one of the greatest assets for our company. We also make great use of the ability to build widgets and the tools available to allow employees to upload documents such as PTO forms and signed acknowledgments. I have used many other HRIS and payroll systems and can honestly say it would take a lot to convince me to walk away from Ascentis.
- Benefits: Great for tracking benefits enrollments, online benefit elections through simple wizards, and the ability to set up file feeds that go directly to your benefit vendors.
- Custom Tabs: No need to track bonus eligibility, license numbers, workers compensation codes, certifications, etc.. on spreadsheets. You just build a simple custom tab and will be able to track and report on any information entered.
- Reporting: Ascentis has the easiest and most accessible reporting capabilities I have seen in an HRIS system. They have "canned" reports but they also have custom reports which provide the capability of accessing all data. It also can download reports to .csv format which make converting data to Excel a breeze.
- Self-Service: The Company Directory should be downloadable into PDF. Once of the complaints my employees have had is why can't they download the directory so it would be great to see this function in the near future.
March 29, 2018
MyAscentisHR
Ascentis HR is being used by Administrative and HR personnel only. The process is used for our HR tool for employee management relating to our Time and separate Payroll functions.
- Allows tracking of employee enablement or disablement of Time function.
- Incorporates capability of integrating employee personnel info with service retention, benefits eligibility, attendance, etc.
- Easy onboarding.
- Occasionally information from Ascentis HR does not pass to Time module correctly.
March 23, 2018
Ascentis Review
Ascentis HR is being used across the organization for employee and manager self-service, applicant tracking, open enrollment and communications. It has automated a lot of our paperwork and on-boarding processes.
- The ATS of Ascentis is easy to use and our managers are able to access candidates right away. It also connects with other sites such as Indeed and Glassdoor, which saves us a step.
- The Employee Self-Service works well for our employees to update their personal information.
- The Home page of Ascentis allows us to post important updates and forms for employees to fill out.
- In the ATS, there is no "quick apply" option and we get a lot of complaints that our application process takes too long.
- The reporting functionality is tedious, takes a long time to access and then there is a lot of data clean up.
- Ascentis is not visually pleasing on the front end or backend.
- I feel as though when they made the sales pitch they weren't clear about what would be included in the "basic" package and anything extra that you want to do, i.e. get a feed to a new website is at least $1,000 which gets old after a while.
March 21, 2018
Ascentis is much better than ADP
We use Ascentis across the whole company. Primary use is for HR files, timekeeper, and payroll.
- Company employee profiles
- Payroll
- Personnel records
- The timekeeper is not as easy as the rest of Ascentis.
March 21, 2018
Ascentis Self-Service has saved me hours of work!
We use Ascentis HR across the organization for our permanent employees. Our employees have been happy with the switch to Ascentis, as they can now see and print their pay stubs from the self-service [portal], change personal information (address, W-4, etc.) as well as see their accrued PTO in timekeeper.
- Benefit enrollment through the self-service portal has been extremely helpful and saved lots of time.
- The report wizard is wonderful! What a breeze running the annual EEO-1 report!
- The ability to change managers for an entire department with one entry vs. individual entries for each member of that department saves is a time saver.
- I found building the benefits for open enrollment to be quite confusing. This may get easier with experience, but I found it to be difficult.
- Although employees have access to their pay stubs in the self-service portal, it would be helpful for their manager to have access to their stubs as well.
March 21, 2018
Ascentis HR makes our employees happy!
Ascentis HR is being used for recruiting employees and maintaining employment and payroll records.It is used by all of our administrative staff and Board of Directors.
- Ascentis HR keeps the information you need for recruiting and retaining employees at your fingertips.
- Ascentis HR makes it easier to complete payroll and other company and government reports.
- Ascentis HR facilitates important communication between HR, Payroll, and Administration.
- Ascentis HR gives great training sessions, but more of these would be helpful.
- Ascentis HR does well with integrating with our other software, but more training would be useful.
- Ascentis HR has the capacity for creating countless reports, but more training would be appreciated.
March 21, 2018
Ascentis HR Review by an HR Specialist
Our HR department houses and uses Ascentis HR every day. In a way, this is used across the board in our company due to the use of ESS (Employee Self Service) which links employee info to Ascentis HR. Allows us to track all employee personal information, job history, payment history, benefit enrollments, notes, attachments, acknowledgments, employee relations documents, etc. The capabilities of Ascentis HR are great!
- Employee Self Service is a great tool to post and receive communication, updates, document links, etc. out to employees. It also connects directly to the HRIS system keep information all in one place.
- Open Enrollment feature and carrier connect; allows employees to enroll in their benefits creating a paperless process. Once the enrollment sections are approved by the Ascentis Administrators (HR) the information rolls over directly to the carriers with the carrier connect process. It's absolutely seamless and efficient.
- The opportunities for other Modules that connect to the HRIS - recruiting/onboarding, payroll, and Timekeeper - definitely a plus!
- Email capabilities directly from ESS - whether this is messages, memos, forms, documentation - the ability to keep this information all in the system and track any communication would be helpful as opposed to having to upload everything.
- Animation on ESS widgets. Rotating pictures, information, and videos! Can add an enhanced view for companies.
- HRIS - being able to upload multiple documents from drives/files to the HRIS all at once. Currently, you can only do 1 item at a time.
March 21, 2018
Ascentis HR Gets an A+ Rating in HR
As a trusted consultant to my clients, I am in a position to refer the best HRIS system. I implemented Ascentis HR for a client of mine who had previously had the client-server version installed locally but was about 5 years old and not utilized to its fullest capacity. I implemented the cloud-based version for this client and they are happily building it out and using it. The system allows HR to provide customized business reporting to executives so targeted business decisions can be made based on facts and trends.
- The reporting capability and customization is of great use.
- The system is very user-friendly and doesn't require users to know and understand coding.
- The cloud availability is great for technology companies who don't necessarily conduct all of their business in one location. It allows flexibility with staffing and telecommuting for HR professionals.
- I really can't say that Ascentis needs to improve at this point. It's a great system for organizations who want a full-bodied system without the expense and downtime of implementation and training.
March 21, 2018
ASSentis or Astounding?
Ascentis HR is our people management for Build.com. It is used throughout the company by each employee to track
- The system is flexible and allows for me and my team to structure the system to work for us.
- Ascentis HR customer support is phenomenal. I can call Dave, Cooper, Brian, Mary-Ellen, or Bahiya and get immediate and excellent customer service. In the world of people management software that is extremely valuable to me and my time.
- ACA reporting and support has been an extremely valuable tool.
- Ascentis has had some problems with the system going down for periods of time, I think part of that is Novatime and part of that is Ascentis itself.
- The supervisor interface is not always as "dummy proof" as I would like, and could be more intuitive for the supervisor user.
March 21, 2018
Lacking System
Ascentis is used as our HRIS. It is used across the entire organization. It is used for onboarding all employees, benefits administration, timekeeping, and recruiting. It is supposed to be used for performance but the product is not great.
- There are a variety of really great reports that we can pull. The ability to create custom reports is also a plus.
- The performance management system needs a lot of work. We've encountered so many different issues that we didn't use it for two review periods which cost us a lot of time.
- The ATS tracking system is not the greatest. It is especially difficult uploading or updating the documents needed after an applicant has been hired.
March 21, 2018
HR Generalist
We use it for the HRIS System and Recruiting Package also! We also use it for In-Processing.
- Updating the software often, which is helpful because things are changing all the time.
- Love the reporting - can do almost anything with it. Being able to copy and paste it to another documents is great.
- Recruiting is very easy to learn and teach someone else.
- Self-Service Wizard - It always seems to time out close to the end of trying to get things in motion.
- In recruiting you can only add one location and with our business we have "contingent upon award of contract" which could have more than one location for one position.
March 21, 2018
Ascentis HR - Review
Ascentis is used in the finance and HR departments as an HRIS, payroll, and timekeeper system. The Ascentis Self-Service System is a huge benefit for our team and our employees. However, it is strange how the systems don't all work as cohesively together. It's great that it can incorporate HRIS, payroll, and timekeeping as its easier to manage one system rather than 3 different systems that don't work together. I reporting aspect in Novatime is great as well as Ascentis HR. The system could certainly be updated as it looks like it was made in the 90's.
- Great customer service, the support team is fairly easy to reach via phone and email.
- Great internal reporting aspects of the system.
- All in one system with HRIS, Payroll, and Timekeeping.
- Updated system design. (timekeeping has been updated - nice touch)
- No need to access the system through remote desktop seems silly.
- All data needs to be added to the different systems manually and approved. Multiple/duplicate steps reduce efficiency.
March 20, 2018
Ascentis HR Review
We use it primarily for vacation requests for the whole organization.
- It works great for time off requests and approvals.
- It helps our managers quickly look up employee details, such as pay rate, hire date, etc.
- Allows employees to easily and quickly view their available accrued time off.
- Make it easier to include part-time employees with different vacation accrual rates to be added to the system.
- Support needs to be a little more responsive and helpful to questions.