An Honest Review
October 28, 2021
An Honest Review
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Deputy
I work in a bookkeeping company and have implemented Deputy for a number of clients. The one I am using for this review is a food/beverage industry with over 200 employees. It is used for scheduling and timesheets for payroll. It addresses the problem of scheduling and having a database with all staff members in a central place for shift covering between different locations and areas. It also implements awards, which is very useful for calculating penalty rates. The archive function for employees-not-in-use makes it easy to reinstate staff members if they leave then come back (majority of the staff members are students and may take extended periods of leave or leave then come back).
- Scheduling.
- Dashboard for timesheets and leave pending approval.
- Easy for managers to view and set up schedules requiring training across different areas.
- Awards - with over 200 staff members, [in my experience,] it is a nightmare trying to update the awards every time they change. [In my opinion,] it would be far more useful to be able to select an option to automatically apply award updates across the staff.
- Customer Service - [In my experience,] when I started using Deputy 5 years ago, it was much easier to get help and to speak to people who knew the product. The customer service is absolutely shocking now [in my opinion] and is a massive reason why I no longer recommend Deputy to clients looking for payroll management software. [In my experience,] the responses are incredibly unhelpful and no one ever follows up. [Personally,] I've had issues that were never resolved, and [I feel] my messages have been ignored. [I believe] I've been led in circles for hours and passed around a team due to lack of knowledge when I needed help with some timesheet exports, and [I believe] I've never received a phone call I requested at least twice.
- Birthday rate changes for employees - [In my experience,] we always need to do this manually in the payroll software for payroll adjustments. It would be easier if Deputy would allow us to change a birthday rate and apply it only to the timesheets approved after the rate change. [In my experience,] if someone has a birthday mid-pay period and we update it in Deputy, it exports out at the new rate for all shifts and not for the timesheets approved at that rate.
- Better visibility on names - have their preferred name and their actual name in brackets. [In my opinion, it] makes it difficult for payroll when staff use different names and trying to match them up.
- Audit reports seeing who made changes - eg: my company had all the public holidays set up for all the states in the background settings and one of the staff members who had access to the background settings went through and changed them, but we couldn't confirm who it was to advise them not to do this again as they did it incorrectly and it affected an entire pay.
- Great for penalty rates, so saves time not needing to work those out.
- [In my opinion,] if something goes wrong and the customer service is not helpful, then it can add hours onto a payroll.
- [It is] good to have timesheet history saved for future reference with employee comments.
- [It] doesn't have KM claim option - [in my experience,] this has to be added in manually after exporting to payroll software.
- Xero and QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets)
[Personally,] I use and recommend Keypay above the others because it allows for easy award interpretation, scheduling, timesheets, runs payroll solely out of it's own software, so there's no need to pay for two subscriptions and the customer service is fantastic. It can be as basic or advanced as required. [In my opinion,] Xero timesheets are very basic and I don't often recommend them unless it's for a small business on easy to manage shifts without a lot of penalty rates. But it is included with Xero, so sometimes works out a better option for small businesses. [Personally,] I recommend Deputy if scheduling is required or shifts with multiple pay rates. [In my experience,] Quickbooks Time is very unpleasant for use and I recommend Deputy over Quickbooks. Deputy has much better functionality and is more user-friendly than Quickbooks Time. I only recommend Quickbooks Time to clients who already use Quickbooks and need time tracking on projects to invoice to their clients.
Do you think Deputy delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Deputy's feature set?
Yes
Did Deputy live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Deputy go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Deputy again?
Yes