Buyer Beware - ADP Workforce Now will not be available when you need them.
September 13, 2023

Buyer Beware - ADP Workforce Now will not be available when you need them.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with ADP Workforce Now

Our company creates and implements lighting designs for major events and luxury brands. We employ a core team of designers and engineers who plan the work and interact with clients and then a we have a massive network of casual employees we bring in to execute the design. Each design is bespoke, technically complex, and short term, so our implementation teams are specially selected for each job to ensure we have the right people with the right skill sets on the job site. This creates several payroll challenges, I have a huge pool of folks who may or may not work for us in a given week, quarter, or year, and there's really no way for me to know which employees will get a lot of work and which ones will only work for a day or two. I was looking for a payroll company that could handle the expansion and contraction of our label pool without requiring a bunch of busy work from me. ADP Workforce Now appeared to be that solution.

Pros

  • ADP Workforce Now only bills clients for how many employees are paid in a cycle rather than billing for every "active" employee. In my research, they were the only major US payroll company with this billing option. Since our company goes from paying 20 people one cycle to 150 people the next, this is a very important cost control measure for our company.

Cons

  • In my experience, the transition to ADP Workforce Now from our old provider was a nightmare. By far this was the worst Implementation team I've ever experienced. Taxes and PTO were messed up for months. I had to say the same things over and over again in meetings. In my opinion, there was very little work done on my account between meetings and it was abundantly clear that my emails were not getting read. We spent most of the zoom calls in silence listening to the implementation manager type questions to "the tech team" and mutter to himself.
  • Overall, in my experience, customer service is very, very, very bad. For us, it takes days to get a reply and you are encouraged to just scroll through online forums looking for answers. I take a lot of my questions to Chat GPT these days, it's a lot more efficient for me.
  • In my experience, there are HEAVY limitations on what the system can/can't do. And, in my opinion, when you run up against them the response from ADP Workforce Now is just a shoulder shrug and "well that's how it works, what can you do about?" I believe there is zero attempt to find a creative solution or explore writing a custom script. The sales team told me they had "best in class technology." That has not been evident in my case.
  • Getting employees to engage with ADP Workforce Now has been challenging for us. The User Registration Codes expire long before the employees use them, I'm constantly receiving "I can't log in" emails. It's a true drain on my time and an explosion of my workload.
  • Positive - it has lowered our payroll processing costs
  • Negative - it has created a huge, unanticipated, and largely unhelpful load of work for me.
In my opinion, ADP Workforce Now's version of "scaleability" seems to rely on administrators to do a lot of heavy lifting. I'm not interested in running a company that is top-heavy with admins just so we can facilitate the folks who actually do the work getting paid on time. I have been very disappointed by ADP Workforce Now's inflexibility, I suggest you remember that any "customizations" you are offered by the sales team are just window dressing. The back-end is immutable and customer service, in my experience, is near non-existent.
  • Lasso - Crew Schedule and Time Keeping Management System
  • Xero - Bookkeeping
  • Excel - Reporting
At the end of the day a lot of stuff just gets pushed to a CSV file and then manually uploaded to another database. Am I always going to be the boring human link that makes two databases talk to one-another? I had hoped for more Open API integration but with all the problems getting taxes and PTO solved, I just couldn't bring myself to deal with another round of requests.
not particularly different, except I think the customer service is worse with ADP Workforce Now.

Do you think ADP Workforce Now delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with ADP Workforce Now's feature set?

No

Did ADP Workforce Now live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of ADP Workforce Now go as expected?

No

Would you buy ADP Workforce Now again?

No

I'd give a zero if I could. I think it's truly bad.
I would not recommend ADP Workforce Now to anyone in my industry, I think it is terrible at supporting temporary and casual workers who don't need a bunch of bells and whistles, they just need to quickly log in to a website and look at their check stub. In my opinion, it seems to be built for small - to - medium size business with regular full-time and part-time employees working regular schedules.

ADP Workforce Now Feature Ratings

3.0
Employee demographic data
5
Employment history
Not Rated
Job profiles and administration
Not Rated
Workflow for transfers, promotions, pay raises, etc.
1
Organizational charting
Not Rated
Organization and location management
Not Rated
Compliance data (COBRA, OSHA, etc.)
Not Rated
1.2
Pay calculation
2
Support for external payroll vendors
1
Off-cycle/On-Demand payment
1
Benefit plan administration
Not Rated
Direct deposit files
1
Salary revision and increment management
1
Reimbursement management
1
1.0
Approval workflow
1
Balance details
1
Annual carry-forward and encashment
1
1.0
View and generate pay and benefit information
1
Update personal information
1
View company policy documentation
1
Employee recognition
Not Rated
Asset Management ()
Not Rated
1.7
Report builder
1
Pre-built reports
3
Ability to combine HR data with external data
1
Integration with other HR capabilities ()
Not Rated
Not Rated
Performance plans
Not Rated
Performance improvement plans
Not Rated
Review status tracking
Not Rated
Review reminders
Not Rated
Multiple review frequency
Not Rated
Succession Planning ()
Not Rated
1.5
New hire portal
2
Manager tracking tools
1
Not Rated
Corporate goal setting
Not Rated
Individual goal setting
Not Rated
Line-of sight-visibility
Not Rated
Performance tracking
Not Rated
Not Rated
Job Requisition Management
Not Rated
Company Website Posting
Not Rated
Publish to Social Media
Not Rated
Job Search Site Posting
Not Rated
Applicant Tracking
Not Rated
Notifications and Alerts
Not Rated

Using ADP Workforce Now

My company only needs to use about 25% of the various tools and offerings in ADP Workforce Now, but to get to those things I have to sort through dozens and dozens of tools and fields and menus that I don't need. I think it's inefficient, I'm constantly waiting for screens to load, or trying to remember which of the 3 options is the one I actually need. While you can "favorite" some screens for easier navigation, in my opinion, this feature isn't as robust as it could be and that only solves part of the problem. The Employee Profiles are spread across at least 12 screens, each with dozens of info tiles I don't need to see because they're devoid of information.
ProsCons
Technical support not required
Feel confident using
Do not like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Updating employee information
  • Changing local tax information
  • setting up employee access
  • onboarding new employees
  • re-onboarding returning employees
Yes - For employees it works fine, for admins it's useless for us.

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