Item: TriNet
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Support Rating

This is one of the high points of TriNet, from my perspective. From the salesperson who sold it, to the consultant who helped us with initial on-boarding and implementation, to the rep who services any of our regular support inquiries, the support and human assistance provided by TriNet is WAY better than the kind of bare minimum, obviously outsourced support you get with major large companies today. That said, once you get into your groove using the TriNet dashboard (Passport) and such, you don't need to use support that often, at least for a company of our size.

Usability

First time use is a little rough for certain new tasks that you want to do for the first time. In fairness to TriNet, there's A LOT you can do in Passport, so I don't have immediate instincts for how they could rapidly improve their whole UI and usability experience, but, in fairness to me, that's not my job, and it could definitely be better. ;)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

TriNet is used to manage payroll and benefits at our company. It is used across the whole company, and it helps us solve the problem of wanting to offer competitive benefits and health insurance rates to our relatively small number of employees.

Pros and Cons

Health insurance rates are very competitive with our other options.
Various support professionals at TriNet have always been extremely helpful/professional.
Partnership with Transamerica allowing us to offer 401(k)s is pretty cool.

The actual dashboard interface, even with the new redesign, is not always the world's most intuitive.
Email alerts/warnings sometimes don't do a good job of making it clear what kinds of companies they do and do not apply to (aka "this alert only applies to companies with 25+ full-time employees" would be helpful).
My main TriNet support person works east coast hours, which is strange, since we're a west coast company.

Return on Investment

We've been able to offer far more robust, diverse, and customizable benefits than before to our employees.
It was a little bit of a struggle the first time around to get all of our data over to our bookkeeper for taxes because they used to manage our payroll and port that stuff over automatically.

Alternatives Considered

Intuit Payroll

TriNet is way more all encompassing than anything else we've used, which, once we got into the swing of it, was better than having disparate payroll and insurance providers covering (hopefully) everything. TriNet does give a general sense of security that our bases are covered, which is much appreciated.

Likelihood to Recommend

My sense is that TriNet is great if you are willing to accept all of TriNet's services the TriNet way. If you want to manage some aspect of your own payroll or use your own workers' comp plan or something like that, my sense is that TriNet would not be a great choice for your organization.

Covering All of our Bases with TriNet

Overall Satisfaction with TriNet