Item: Paylocity
Rating: 3
Author: Jennifer Hagen, SHRM-CP

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Paylocity was used for onboarding, offboarding, payroll, and employee management. It was supposed to streamline the HR processes and make the job of the HR manager easier. We had multiple locations in over 8 states, so it was imperative that I received strong support from a company that had experience with handling payroll and taxes for a multi-state company.

When I started with the company, they were in the process of adding the benefits admin system and COBRA administration. I decided to wait to add these modules until I was embedded in the system and knew how it worked.

Pros and Cons

Customer support was readily available
Many modules to choose from
Affordable

Customer service training
Ability to remote assign I-9 signatures
Disjointed onboarding process
Difficulty in navigating to parts of the employee record
Not all pieces of the employee record were located in one place
Dedicated account rep that knew how to use their own system

Return on Investment

Time consuming - on the phone with customer support daily
Poor training documentation
Helped with paying state taxes

Paylocity Automated Processes

The onboarding worked okay. It was not easy to use, unfortunately, and I had to help candidates walk through the process.

I felt the payroll process was cumbersome and very hard to use.

In my experience, the consolidation of data was a huge problem. The company moved to Paycom shortly after I left. I had already approved the move before leaving.

Paylocity Employee Engagement

I cannot think of anything positive. We used an external system for peer recognition and did not use the baked-in products for Paylocity.

I did use the employee surveys, and those worked well. They would go out automatically at 90 days and at a year. I got valuable feedback from new employees.

Alternatives Considered

BambooHR and Paycom

I did not select Paylocity and was vetting other products when I decided to leave.

Key Insights

Do you think Paylocity delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Paylocity's feature set?

Did Paylocity live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Paylocity go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Paylocity again?

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, BambooHR, DataPath Summit

Likelihood to Recommend

The training that was given by Paylocity was minimal at best. The account manager trained differently than the CSR, and each CSR had learned a different way of doing things. I was able to figure out the system better than they were in many instances.

With COVID, it was imperative to assign the I-9 task to a different person than the HR Manager. This was a huge undertaking, and there was very little knowledge surrounding how to do it. I found it cumbersome when part of the employee record was on one side, and other things I had to leave the employee record to find.

In my opinion, the reporting was ridiculous and inconsistent from one report to another. Payroll was cumbersome and not intuitive. I have used QuickBooks for years and would rather use it outside of my HRIS than use Paylocity.

Steer clear of Paylocity - You will be better off!

Overall Satisfaction with Paylocity