Item: Ascentis (discontinued)
Rating: 8
Author: iain Stephen

Overall Satisfaction with Ascentis

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Ascentis HR is used by the entire organization. We use it to allow employees to request time off and to track HR for all staff. Our paramedics, unfortunately, do NOT use the time off features as the scheduling system in use for them is outside of Ascentis, but all other staff use self-service.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Employee Self Service is excellent
Notes, attachments to employee records are easy to use
Management self service is also well thought out, although we would like to see managers included in their own team calendar views.

Cons

We looked at the scheduling system available from Ascentis - in depth - it was almost what we needed for our paramedics, but not quite (NovaTime) - it would be great to move in that direction in the future.
A way to connect leave calendars to MS Outlook would be a wonderful tool.
The need to use remote desktop to get to Employee Manager and Setup Manager is cumbersome - people forget their passwords frequently - it would be nice to see Ascentis move toward web-based functionality for the entire thing.

Most Important Features

Self Service for employees
Web-based - no client installation required
Logical setup - carryover and other rules are simple and straight forward.

Return on Investment

It projects a level of professionalism to staff and third parties. Many of our 'sister-agencies' do not have HR software at all.
As stated - we were excited about the idea of scheduling through NovaTime but it became a costly venture to customize - and there were a lot of grey promises on both sides.

Alternatives Considered

Sage 300cloud (formerly Sage 300 ERP)

The employee self-service is the key strength to Ascentis - staff like it - and use it.
The employee manager is also strong - and the setup just works once it is done.

Key Insights

Do you think Ascentis (discontinued) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Ascentis (discontinued)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Ascentis (discontinued) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Ascentis (discontinued) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Ascentis (discontinued) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Power BI, Parallels Remote Application Server, Sage 300cloud (formerly Sage 300 ERP), Slack, Microsoft Teams

Likelihood to Recommend

Ascentis is well suited for salaried, full-time staff on a regular schedule. The web-based employee self-service is very strong.

We do not find the payroll function to be well suited to our needs - and as mentioned previously, the NovaTime scheduling system could not be customized to work for us without spending upwards of $20K US.

Ascentis (discontinued) Feature Ratings

Ascentis Support

Support Rating

Ascentis support usually responds to email in a timely manner - sometimes a quick phone call helps speed things up. Overall quite pleased with their support, although for the most part it is simply password resets for the RDP users.
We hope to see a full web-based employee manager function soon.

Exceptional Examples of Ascentis (discontinued) Support

I don't think we have had a time when we needed exceptional support from Ascentis - certainly not since we moved to the hosted version which no longer required updating a local server version in our LAN room. I am sure if we need them, they will be there for us.

Comments

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Ascentis HR - It just works!