Item: Paychex Flex
Rating: 1
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Unfortunately, my experience with Paychex Flex was extremely disappointing. From the beginning, we encountered numerous problems with their services. The onboarding process was a nightmare. In my case, it took months and months of emails back and forth with multiple people requesting the same information over and over again. In my experience, they made countless errors in our set up and payroll and caused inefficiencies that cost us time and money to correct. Employee turnover seemed to a huge problem, and any employees that weren't new, were just promoted to the new position so there never seemed to be anyone in a position that really knew what they were doing. Additionally, their benefits and 401k management left a lot to be desired. We had to constantly follow up with them to make sure that everything was being handled properly. Moreover, I feel their hiring process was inefficient and lacked proper procedures. We had to constantly follow up with them to ensure that the employees were set up properly in the system for payroll and benefits. In my opinion, the system was not user-friendly, and we had a hard time navigating through it. We also found it absurd that we could not send an offer letter through the system until after the candidate had been hired. What's the point of that? To make matters worse, in my experience, their software was not user-friendly, which made it difficult to access important information and reports. I feel that it was frustrating to navigate their platform, and we often had to rely on their customer support team to help us find what we needed. Even fixing an employee timeclock mistake was an unnecessarily difficult task. Overall, I would not recommend Paychex Flex to anyone. In my experience, they made false promises, caused a lot of headaches, and failed to deliver on their services. Save yourself the trouble and look for a more reliable PEO and payroll provider.

Pros and Cons

I did not have a good experience with Flex, it is "OK" technology. Not on par with newer products and software but costs as much or more.

In my experience, terrible PEO onboarding and offboarding (we left after first year contract was up)
In my opinion, there are too many people in new positions who don't know exactly how to handle a situation which requires constant corrections and fixing things and bringing more people in to correct the situation. Lots of time wasted as a business owner.
I feel time and Attendance was cumbersome, employees made more mistakes than in my previous software and fixing it was also unnecessarily difficult. Integration was quirky, even importing into Flex Payroll from Time and Attendance had delays and issues. The software needs work.

Return on Investment

ROI was terrible, I feel I wasted countless hours dealing with errors and honestly, left Paychex at the end of 2022 and am still dealing with issues 3 months later with payroll charges (still charging me for Time and Attendance) and 401k issues.
In my opinion, Paychex had a significant negative impact on my business as it took a lot of effort and time on my part to work through things I had been doing on my own for years before Paychex. It was actually more difficult with them in the mix.

Paychex Flex Reporting

I have not used the reporting

Support Rating

Paychex support representatives were overall friendly and tried to be helpful. Actually, many times the general support department were the ones who corrected issues caused by my PEO "specialists". For quick issues related to payroll and such, calling support was typically a good experience. There were times where the thing I needed to call about should have been something that could easily have been done independently without support, but often that wasn't the case as the software is very complex and a bit cumbersome.

Alternatives Considered

Gusto

Gusto is a much easier platform to use and integrate with. It may lack a few features of Paychex, but it has most features, is easier to work with, costs less money and does most things better.

Key Insights

Do you think Paychex Flex delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Paychex Flex's feature set?

Did Paychex Flex live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Paychex Flex go as expected?

Would you buy Paychex Flex again?

Usability

It does the job, but not as easily as it should.

Other Software Used

Gusto

Likelihood to Recommend

I did not have a great experience with Paychex flex. The integration to Time and Attendance (which cost extra) was clunky compared to others I've used. My employees would make a mistake clocking in/out and it was very cumbersome for them or myself to correct. This is not the case with all software. Some things I considered simple with my past software required me to get my "payroll specialist" to do something on the back end. As a busy small business owner with a self service product, it's much easier when you don't need to get help from support to make simple changes. It would also have been helpful if my payroll specialist didn't change 3 times in a year.

Products Replaced

Yes - Gusto Payroll. I was looking for a better benefits and HR package and went for a PEO (not available in Gusto). It was a bad decision and I switched back to Gusto Payroll.

Key Differentiators

Cloud Solutions
Other

My decision to change was based on switching to a PEO that could supposedly help me run and integrate all aspects of my Company. That did not happen. The software was clunky, there were issues with implementation and it is not easy to self manage and use all the software's capabilities.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I would not choose Paychex again.

Avoid Paychex Flex PEO and Payroll Service

Overall Satisfaction with Paychex Flex