Item: Paychex Flex
Rating: 1
Author: Katrina Godsey

Overall Satisfaction with Paychex Flex

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We made the switch from Paychex Preview to Paychex Flex in October of 2015. We use Paychex for ESR, FSA, Time and Attendence, Payroll, HRIS and employee self-service. We were encouraged to switch to their new cloud based solution after experiencing ongoing issues with the functionality of these systems as integrated under Preview.

Pros and Cons

Pros

User Interface is better than Preview and the previous "landing page" system.
Payroll is simplified and would make processing easier for a novice provided there were no problems.

Cons

Their ESR reporting is a NIGHTMARE. Despite starting the process in November and sending them their own forms correctly filled out more than 13 times, the information was not imported correctly into their system until the very last minute of March 14th the following year.
There is no employee self-service option with Flex. Despite being the "newer, better" product our employees cannot even change their addresses themselves.
Customer service is hit or miss. We have one rep who is absolutely fantastic the rest are either unreachable, untrained or completely absent.

Return on Investment

Out of 16 payrolls since switching we have been error free on 4. For the rest of the payrolls bizarre things would happen that we had no control over such as reimbursements appearing for all employees whose last names started with "B" or 401k limits disppearing. This switch has cost us many man hours trying track down errors and waiting on hold for customer service to "fix" them.

Alternatives Considered

Likelihood to Recommend

We have 92 employees and I cannot imagine having to deal with a larger company. Perhaps smaller companies of >50 would be more manageable.

Paychex Flex Feature Ratings

Comments

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Robin Gerstad
commented 8 years ago
I so agree! I am just trolling the web, looking to see if anyone else is experiencing the kind of mind boggling hell that I have been going through with Paychex this past year. I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone! Their salespeople were very nice and did an excellent job of selling me on Flex, their online payroll platform and also stratustime, their online Time & Attendance platform. As sold to me, the two were supposed to be integrated. Today they were just integrated after literally months of begging them to do as they had promised, and now it is even more screwed up than ever. I have dealt with at least a dozen support reps, some good, some completely incompetent. The worst part has been that Flex has reps, and stratustime has reps, but there is not a single person in the entire company that knows both platforms, and they do not communicate with one another. They are particularly bad at setting up individual job costing. I have nearly a year's worth of labor hours now for which I cannot pull usable data for any report that I might need (certified payroll, ex). It has been a nightmare of monumental proportions and I totally regret my decision to move away from Preview. I do not understand why their stock keeps going up, when their products AND their customer service are in the toilet. So here is my advice: if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
cathie emerson
commented 7 years ago
I started with Paychex in 2014, a year later They sold me stratustime. Horrible product. Not integrated with the payroll. I couldn't find anyone to help me with all the issues I was having. One day, a salesman from Paychex walked i to my store. I told him my horror stories. He sold me flextime. For 6 months I have been charged for both products. I have spoken to at least 15 people, no one can seem to fix it. I haven't left them yet, because I need that money back! I have never seen such incompetence in my 59 years of life!!! Stay away from this product!!!

Run, Don't Walk from Paychex