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UltiPro changed my payroll life!
Updated December 13, 2021

UltiPro changed my payroll life!

Jack Klott, SHRM-SCP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with UKG Pro

UKGPro is currently being used by the HR and payroll departments. Our employees are also using it for self service options to update address information, view their pay statements and W-2s, as well as viewing their benefits information. We've also launched the performance management tools and are conducting performance reviews and compensation reviews within the application. Over the next 12 months, we'll be using the application to better communicate metric data to executive managers all the way down to our front line supervisors.
  • Payroll processing - We have four pay groups and we can pick and choose which pay groups we'll run payroll for and which ones we're not quite ready to run yet. There is a great deal of configurability and flexibility when running the payroll. Since our launch of UltiPro, we've reduced the time it takes to run payroll from roughly 3 and a half days, to 8 hours.
  • The business intelligence reporting is amazing. It took approximately 2 weeks for us to learn, but after learning where the fields are located, the tool is great!
  • The configurability of the application was one of the aspects that I liked best when going through the review process. When the salesperson tells you that the system is highly configurable, that is exactly what it means. Practically everything that I have looked at, I have been able to configure the page, fields or business rules to fit what I wanted to do.
  • The talent management area is very easy to use and intuitive.
  • Perception survey tool is incredibly insightful and has allowed us to better measure our employee's engagement.
  • One area that I would consider UltiPro to be lacking is with the original benefits administration module. The process has improved significantly in the last several years, but it can be difficult to manage contingencies and other factors that could impact an employee's benefit elections.
  • The tax, wage attachments and garnishments area is working its way back to being a strength, but they've had some significant challenges over the last several years.
  • Using the Employee Voice module, we've reported an increase in engagement across several benchmarks of more than 25% over the last 4 years.
  • Our payroll processing time has reduced from approximately 36 hours on average, to just over 8 hours total.
  • Work schedules are now being tracked within the workforce management application rather than on a spreadsheet that would be printed and posted. Employee's have consistent access to their schedules on their mobile device.
  • Costs savings
  • Time savings
We are continuing to utilize the tools available in UltiPro to achieve our goals, both from a people standpoint and an operations standpoint. The key focus today is to hold on to our employees and to better understand what their challenges are. We are working to address those challenges through the functionality in UltiPro and giving our employees access to those tools so they can be successful.
When it comes to service and support, there is no comparison between UKG, Ceridian, ADP, Workday or other HCM vendors out there. The support that we have received over the previous three years has been the best I've ever experienced in my 15+ years of working in human resources systems and payroll.

Do you think UKG Pro delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with UKG Pro's feature set?

Yes

Did UKG Pro live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of UKG Pro go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy UKG Pro again?

Yes

The usability of this product is super! Good flow for the navigation, good layout for employees to understand. It does take some training for your employees to figure out some of the features, but those that get used to technology quickly will have no problems. You'll need to spend more time with your late adopters of technology.
We have centralized our recruiting function by using the Recruiting module within UKG Pro. All recruiting activities, including recruiter notes, manager notes, requisition approvals and offer letters are now all housed within the Recruiting portal. This has been a huge change for our teams to be able to consolidate this process, but it has delivered a consistent and measurable candidate experience so that candidate's will continue to view our company as an organization that values all candidates.
UltiPro is well suited for any employer, small or large. It has scalability and can be configured to fit any employer's needs. Where I would say it is less appropriate is if you need a slightly more robust recruiting system and you need some additional functionality around your talent acquisition process.

UKG Pro Feature Ratings

8.6
Employee demographic data
9
Employment history
9
Job profiles and administration
9
Workflow for transfers, promotions, pay raises, etc.
8
Organizational charting
7
Organization and location management
9
Compliance data (COBRA, OSHA, etc.)
9
9.4
Pay calculation
10
Off-cycle/On-Demand payment
10
Benefit plan administration
8
Direct deposit files
10
Salary revision and increment management
9
7.7
Approval workflow
8
Balance details
6
Annual carry-forward and encashment
9
8.4
View and generate pay and benefit information
8
Update personal information
9
View job history
8
View company policy documentation
9
Employee recognition
8
8.0
Tracking of all physical assets
8
8.3
Report builder
9
Pre-built reports
9
Ability to combine HR data with external data
7
Integration with other HR capabilities ()
Not Rated
7.0
Performance plans
8
Performance improvement plans
7
Review status tracking
6
Review reminders
7
Multiple review frequency
7
6.0
Create succession plans/pools
6
Candidate ranking
6
Candidate search
6
Candidate development
6
8.5
New hire portal
9
Manager tracking tools
8
8.0
Corporate goal setting
8
Individual goal setting
8
Line-of sight-visibility
8
Performance tracking
8
8.1
Job Requisition Management
8
Company Website Posting
8
Publish to Social Media
8
Job Search Site Posting
8
Duplicate Candidate Prevention
8
Applicant Tracking
9
Notifications and Alerts
8

Upgrading UKG Pro

Yes
  • With the most recent release, we are not able to move all of our job descriptions to be included within the Jobs business rule. The job description can be made viewable to whomever needs to see it and can be updated as necessary.
  • Additional qualifiers were added for us to be able to pick and choose how we wanted to distribute our document acknowledgments.
  • We are now able to disable the ratings for our competencies. We are moving some of our performance reviews to have no ratings and it is just for informational and feedback purposes. The release now allows us to move forward with that initiative.
  • An expanded character limit for our job title field.

UKG Pro Training

If you are familiar with navigating HR applications, then I would say the product can be easy to learn if you don't go through any training. Although, I would not recommend doing that. Ultimate has made it so easy to learn how to better use the application, by adding training videos, job aids and other "Did You Know" types of materials that no user should come back and say they don't know how to do something within the portal. Plus, there is a Customer Success Portal and Knowledge center that has every piece of information that a user could possibly find related to how to do a particular action in UltiPro.
And if that is not enough, then you join the User Communities where you can get feedback from other UltiPro users to find out how THEY handled a particular situation. There are many different ways to leverage the learning opportunities.
  • Online training
  • Self-taught

The online training experience while we were going through implementation was decent. The environment at that time was a virtual environment and was somewhat difficult to set up on our secure network. However, once the details of the environment were taken care of, the training itself was good. There was a lot of information covered during those training sessions, and we were not yet in our actual environment yet, so it was challenging to visualize the information that was being discussed.


Today, they have done away with the virtual environment for the training and they are doing everything via WebEx and in a sandbox environment with a user name and password provided to you during the training session. It is much easier to attend these sessions. There are also self paced training sessions that are very helpful for those that don't have the time during the day to attend a 2-3 hour training session.

Using UKG Pro

7 - 

Our HR department has a staff of 7, including myself, 1 payroll specialist, 3 generalists and 2 recruiters. Most often, we are accessing the payroll and time management functions, but we are also regularly accessing the benefits administration module, performance management, business intelligence and the employee information for regular employee file maintenance.

Since we have been using UltiPro, as a department we have become more efficient with our processes and have had the opportunity to reinvent some processes with the new system.

3 - The employees that regularly maintain and support our UltiPro portal are very detail oriented and have a high regard for quality and accuracy when it comes to both entering data as well as retrieving data out of the system. Regular audits are conducted within different areas of the portal so that information can be verified and is reportable.
  • Performance Management
  • Time Management
  • Payroll
  • Career Development
  • Benefit Administration
  • Measure employee engagement
  • Creating alerts and other emails that are auto generated based on events that happen in UltiPro rather than manually sending reminders/alerts
  • Tying our jobs and competency models to our core values
  • High level metrics dashboards.
  • Career development and leadership development.
  • Onboarding new employees.
The only reason that I give a 9 rather than a 10 is because, while I am an influencer in the decision making process, the final decision to renew vendor relationships is by committee. If the final decision is up to me, Independent Bank would be a partner with Ultimate Software for the rest of my career.

Evaluating UKG Pro and Competitors

Yes - We replaced our ADP portals for HR, Time and Payroll. We were using the HR/Benefits module, PayEx and E-Time. These portals were out of date, difficult to configure, inefficient and the support was poor. Our contract was coming up for renewal so we knew it was time for a change.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
The product features and reputation for excellent support were the primary reasons why we chose to go with Ultimate Software. We did plenty of research and reviewed multiple vendors over a 6-9 month period. After several demos and meetings across multiple vendors, the choice was clear that we felt Ultimate Software was going to be the right partner for us moving forward.
Fortunately, I had an excellent experience from start to finish with the sales, evaluation and selection process with Ultimate. If there was anything I had to change, I would have prepped myself better for the poor experience that I had with moving off of ADP. Getting employee data and history from ADP was a difficult process. It took quite a while to get it from them and it was painful to try contacting them to inquire about it.

UKG Pro Implementation

Make sure you have all of your tax account information with all the states you are registered in available and that you are knowledgeable about the filing status, frequency, etc. We had some unique challenges with our state unemployment tax set up that I was not aware of and needed to be addressed prior to going live. Working with the state unemployment office can be a challenge.
Yes - We implemented as many of the modules as we could possibly do, given the circumstances that our contract with ADP was ending as our Ultimate activation went live. We implemented the Core HR/Payroll and Time applications first. Toward the end of that activation, we also started activation for the Recruiting module and Performance Management so that we could have those modules active as soon as possible.
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - Although we did many WebEx meetings preparing our employees for the change, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably do more WebEx calls and get more feedback from employees and managers regarding the change. We experienced an extremely high call and email volume which was more than what my staff could sustain at that time. But I always recommend to do as much prepping, communication and updates as possible to get employees excited about the change.
  • We had internal turnover within the HR department which significantly impacted our already small staff. However, when I talked to my system consultant about the issues I was facing, they were very supportive and offered as much assistance and support as they could do.
  • We also experienced issues with the multi-jurisdiction tax reporting moving from ADP to UltiPro. This was a known issue at the time with ADP and so there was some manual work that had to be done in order for Ultimate to import the correct tax amounts for employees.
  • Implemented in-house

Configuring UKG Pro

If your staff includes a dedicated person that can focus on the system configurations and all it has to offer, I believe the configuration is just right for this type of product.
The best recommendation I can make for configuring UltiPro is to make sure you learn everything you can about configuring your portal before you start making any changes. Utilize the sandbox environment that Ultimate has made available to clients and test out the functionality before you implement something into your live environment. Or, if you do change something, change it so that it will only impact the role of a specific user type, but not all users.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
Thankfully, there was not much from a customization standpoint that needed to be done for our portal. We did set up a custom expression that calculates our 401(k) match and we set up a custom accrual for our part time staff's time off. But both of those were done with the support of our Ultimate account managers and the excellent support we get from them.

UKG Pro Support

The UltiPro support system is fantastic. As a new client, I was assigned an account manager and had a good hand off from the implementation team to my account manager. The process for submitting and tracking new cases is extremely easy through the Customer Success Portal. While processing payroll, the rapid response hotline is your best option for a quick resolution.

The only negative that I would add is that several cases will get added to the list of open cases, by Ultimate support staff, and not much detail is provided when those cases get submitted, so I am not always clear on what is supposed to be done. Especially with the Payment Services area, it would be nice to have them give a little more detail when submitting a case that needs to be addressed.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Not Available
We went live on UltiPro in October of 2015. Our first year end processing was a little hectic and there were several issues that had to be corrected. These were issues that we had run into, and were not the fault of the system, they were user errors. I called the Ultimate Rapid Response line on Christmas Eve at around 11 am, explaining my situation to them. They helped me create the case, assisted me with a step by step review of the issue and realized that the issue was going to need to be reviewed by the development team. At 515 pm, I received a call from the support agent that I was working with on my cell phone. She told me that they had corrected the issue and that I was able to complete our payroll tasks. She offered to stay on the line with me while I ran through my tasks to make sure there were no other issues that came up, which there weren't. I was so thankful that she stayed with me through that time. That is the level of support that I have come to expect from Ultimate each time I call.

Using UKG Pro

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Employee maintenance, like pay changes and job changes.
  • Benefits administration
  • Preparing time files for payroll
  • Reporting
  • Time management and reviewing time cards
  • Performance evaluations can be challenging to distribute when you have multiple reviews to distribute each month for several individuals in different departments or locations.
Yes - The mobile interface works well. The last release allows employees to complete their performance reviews on their mobile device. Employees and clock in and out using their mobile device if they are allowed to access that function. Changes to employee information can also be reviewed and updated on a mobile device, again, if those features are allowed.

UKG Pro Reliability

We are not global, but we have made some acquisitions in the time that we have been live on UltiPro. While the acquisitions have been rather small, I felt confident that our UltiPro portal would be able to handle the acquisitions without any significant challenges, which it did.
In the 3+ years that we've been live in UltiPro, I believe the core HR/Payroll module went down one time. I don't recall how long it was down for, possibly an hour or two, but thankfully it was not during a payroll week for us so it did not impact us significantly. Other than that, there are some minor outages every once in a while with the Recruiting application, but the communication when those outages occur is very good so you always get status updates.
The response time is always very good within the UltiPro portal. We have very little issues or challenges with performance or latency within our portal. Reports, depending on the level and the amount of data being collected, perform very well. If you have several queries being run within the report with a very large amount of data being produced, there can sometimes be a delay. However, we've learned to have those reports delivered to us via email and on a schedule.
Our integrations do not have any impact on the performance of either UltiPro or the other systems that are integrated.

Integrating UKG Pro

There is a little bit of a learning curve as it relates to the technology behind APIs, but once you get familiar with it, the process is relatively smooth. It does take some time and I recommend having a person that is very familiar with this technology to work on it. I was, and still am, not very familiar with it, but thanks in part to the person we brought on, I now know enough to be a little dangerous and I can speak somewhat intelligently about it.
  • BVS (learning management system)
  • Active directory
  • Concur
Once we were able to bring someone on board that had a good grasp and understanding of APIs the integration was very quick and relatively simple. Testing of the integration was key. We started out slow and then progressed further with adding more data to the integrations.
  • FIS (Core banking system)
Our core banking product does not support integration through API currently so we are working through those challenges currently.
  • File import/export
  • Single Signon
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
Utilize the Learning center that is available in UltiPro. Ultimate gives users so much information on how to set this information up. And if all else fails, you are always able to leverage the Ultimate staff to help you set up the integrations you need as well. Their integration team is great to work with and they typically work very fast.

Relationship with UKG

All throughout the sales process, I never once felt as though we were being "sold" something. I always felt as though Ultimate was offering to partner with us. The other vendors we were reviewing were all about undercutting their competition to give us the best pricing or to give us tickets to their user conference or try to convince me their system was clearly better than the others. But Ultimate sold me on our partnership.
After the sale, we were their priority. They did everything they said they would do, and the communication was always very clear with what they expected from us and what we should expect from them. They did a very good job of onboarding and keeping us engaged from the time we signed the contract to the time we started our activation.
The communication from Ultimate is always excellent. You can choose how much or how little communication you get from them. I never feel as though I don't get enough communication from them. Between emails, contact with my Executive Relationship Manager and my Account Manager, I always feel like I know what is happening with our account.
3 year contract with a 4 year price lock. We are up for renewal this year.
Be open to working with the sales person and listening to their suggestions. They will listen to your challenges as well and they will be open with you to providing you with solutions to those challenges. Keep in mind, there is never a perfect solution that is going to fit all of your HCM needs. It will really come down to, what vendor is going to stick with you to work on solutions for you vs telling you the system does not have the capability of doing what you originally thought it could do. We went with the vendor that wanted to find solutions for us, not be part of the problem.