If support is a concern, no need to worry with Ascentis
March 20, 2019
If support is a concern, no need to worry with Ascentis
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Ascentis
We use Ascentis across the entire organization. We utilize it for Payroll, Open Enrollment, Time Keeping, Recruiting, FMLA tracking, Benefit Tracking/Enrollments, and as an Intranet site for our employees. It centralizes the management of our HR systems and allows us to accurately report on payroll and HR items that we previously weren't able to do.
Before implementing Ascentis, we had several different systems that were being used for different aspects of HR. We were also tracking many things with pen and paper, and it was a very laborious task. Moving to Ascentis has streamlined many of these processes and allowed our managers to get back to managing instead of doing mundane tasks.
Before implementing Ascentis, we had several different systems that were being used for different aspects of HR. We were also tracking many things with pen and paper, and it was a very laborious task. Moving to Ascentis has streamlined many of these processes and allowed our managers to get back to managing instead of doing mundane tasks.
Pros
- Ascentis' support team is top notch. When you need an answer, you can contact them in a variety of ways, and they are very quick to respond. With our last payroll company, it could be days, weeks, or we may have never even received a response.
- The implementation is extremely thorough, and Ascentis makes sure you are thinking about all aspects as you are building the system. Many things can be tailored to your specific situation, so they make sure you are using the system as best you can.
- The stock payroll reports provide a great level of detail. So if you're like me and don't want to have a GL interface, it is very easy to obtain the information needed to create a payroll journal entry.
Cons
- The open enrollment process could be improved. Mostly, I'm speaking of the way the benefit builds relate to each other. For example, we couldn't tell the system that if an employee picked an HSA Medical plan, they weren't able to choose the FSA plan. There seemed to be a lot of manual auditing once open enrollment was complete.
- I'm not a fan of how the HSA contributions function. They are entered as a Third Party pay, so they show up with the garnishments. I feel like the HSA contributions should be segregated from the TP items and have their own place within Ascentis. We seem to have issues with making sure account numbers are tied to the HSA contribution. If not, the funds will be withheld from the employee's pay, but they aren't direct deposited anywhere, so we have to cut a manual check to the bank.
- TimeKeeper is horrible. We had a terrible experience with the implementation of it, and there are some basic functions that we can't seem to get to work without breaking something else. I'm hoping the acquisition of NOVAtime will start making this better over the course of 2019. Sorry for not being more descriptive, but it was all painful.
- From a monetary standpoint, there was some costs savings by consolidating multiple vendors into one. It wasn't extremely material. But I believe the biggest benefit has been the streamlined processes and better setup than any previous payroll/HR system we've used. Knowing that the data coming out of the system is complete and accurate is a great feeling when trying to look at trends and make business decisions.
Ascentis beats them all. I've also worked with several smaller systems for small companies, and Ascentis has the best support and reporting functionality that I've seen thus far. Any system you pick will have its pros and cons, but being able to get a hold of support and get an answer to your issue is worth its weight in gold.
As we were going through our open enrollment for the first time, we had to build out each of the benefit plans within Ascentis. We received the structure of our benefit plans very late, so we were running up to the last few days before the beginning of open enrollment to build these out. We were having issues with two of our benefit builds and couldn't get the premium amounts to match what we were expecting. We sent off an email at 8 pm two nights before open enrollment. We received a response and resolution by 9 am the next morning, so we were able to complete the open enrollment build and start it on time. I was absolutely amazed at the turn around time during what I would consider a peak time for support.
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