Nothing but UltiPro for me!
October 15, 2020

Nothing but UltiPro for me!

Judy Frank | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with UKG Pro (formerly Ultimate Software UltiPro)

Our company is an energy construction company with multiple subsidiary companies. Six of the twelve companies are now using UltiPro for HR and Payroll processing. The other companies came on to UltiPro within the past few months for benefits open enrollment and ongoing benefit administration and reporting. UltiPro allows more insight into subsidiary HR, Payroll and Benefits and a centralized place for administration and reporting and interfaces.
  • Ease of use - Someone with little to no training can come into UltiPro and within a very short time be able to find information, enter data, and create standard reports. With some basic payroll knowledge and training, the process of running payroll through the web interface is extremely easy. I've worked with other systems that are very cumbersome to set up, maintain, and utilize on a regular basis.
  • Payroll taxes - As a Payroll/HRIS Manager, I don't have to worry about whether taxes are set up appropriately to withhold at the proper rate for State and Local as well as Federal taxes. Having Ultimate do our tax fulfillment, they even update our unemployment rates as they receive notifications from the states. If the system and employees are set up correctly, taxes will be withheld correctly without needing to worry about whether or not reciprocity rules are being followed and any other state or federal law.
  • Reporting - Ultimate provides a large number of standard reports that are available to run for both HR and Payroll related activities. Where a standard report may not meet the exact needs of the organization, a Business Intelligence tool is provided (Cognos) so that you can create any type of report you need. While I am not a Cognos expert, I find it easy to use for my needs and can get most any information I want through BI. Ultimate will custom write any report I am not able to create on my own or provide assistance through support to answer any questions I may have.
  • General Ledger - General Ledger could be more user friendly to set up. I think if this functionality were moved to the web with a different type of interface than what is in the back office, it could make the process easier.
  • Employee Tax Setup - Although I love the overall functionality of how taxes are handled in UltiPro, I would prefer to get an error when adding a new employee in the web when a resident state is not set up for that company. Currently it gives a warning, but I've had occasions where I did not receive or did not see the notification sent by HR to set up the new state and taxes were not withheld for months on an employee. When you view the employee in the web, they look correct. But in the back office the resident state is missing and it does not calculate.
  • Communications from Ultimate - I have found that the communications coming from Ultimate on issues (e.g., taxes and wage attachments) are ambiguous. I don't always have time to log in to view a case they created and even then the communication is not always clear and it is difficult to reach the right person to get clarification. If the email sent had more detail, it would make my job much easier. Also, when they do create a case, if they would put some sort of reference in the field available so you can go back to it more quickly, that would be a huge improvement!
  • Print services - You need to have an option to have checks overnighted on the day of printing without paying a $200 fee if this is a normal request and not a late submission. Other payroll providers offer this service. Why can't Ultimate?
  • Time savings
  • Consolidating HR administration under a single solution
  • Security and peace of mind
We are currently using all of the UltiPro solutions -- HR, Payroll, Benefits, and all of the Talent solutions as well. We've also started using Perceptions. It is great to have everything in one database for ease of processing as well as reporting. There's no need for different logins and passwords for multiple solutions.
Hands down, UltiPro is the best. Quite honestly, I've been using UltiPro for 20 years now, so it is very hard to make a comparison. I have reviewed ADP products during those years, and never saw anything that would make me want to switch from UltiPro. What I remember from having used Lawson is that it had split databases -- one for HR and one for payroll. This made reporting very difficult.
I've never had any trouble with pages loading in UltiPro or reports completing in a timely manner. The only issues I have encountered are with Recruiting and Onboarding not being available. This seems to happen more frequently than I would think normal in a SaaS environment. Ultimate is very good though to stay on top of communicating when there are issues to let customers know progress on a solution.
Support seems to be one of those things that goes up and down with UltiPro as the company grows. Over the 20 years I have used UltiPro, I have seen it go from absolutely amazing to not so great and back to really great. At the current moment I would rate support as being very good.
Over the past several years, we have done a lot of implementations bringing subsidiary companies on to Ulti from other systems. Ulti has always provided really great technical support for loading data into the system. While we have the ability to create our own imports now through the web, it is still good to have this type of support when we don't have the time or resources to accomplish everything on our own.
I've used Ultimate for many years and have seen it grow and improve through the years, from basic HR/Payroll to a full HR/Talent Suite offering. I would definitely recommend it to those who have a good knowledge of HR/payroll themselves. It is different than using a payroll service such as ADP or Paycom, and I prefer Ultimate, but if an organization needs more hand-holding, Ultimate may not be the best solution.

UKG Pro Feature Ratings

Employee demographic data
9
Employment history
7
Job profiles and administration
7
Workflow for transfers, promotions, pay raises, etc.
9
Organizational charting
Not Rated
Organization and location management
7
Compliance data (COBRA, OSHA, etc.)
Not Rated
Pay calculation
10
Support for external payroll vendors
9
Benefit plan administration
8
Direct deposit files
9
Salary revision and increment management
9
Approval workflow
9
Balance details
8
Annual carry-forward and encashment
6
View and generate pay and benefit information
10
Update personal information
10
View job history
9
View company policy documentation
Not Rated
Employee recognition
Not Rated
Tracking of all physical assets
5
Report builder
10
Pre-built reports
9
Ability to combine HR data with external data
6
Performance plans
7
Performance improvement plans
7
Review status tracking
7
Review reminders
7
Multiple review frequency
7
Create succession plans/pools
Not Rated
Candidate ranking
Not Rated
Candidate search
Not Rated
Candidate development
Not Rated
Not Rated
New hire portal
Not Rated
Manager tracking tools
Not Rated
Corporate goal setting
8
Individual goal setting
8
Line-of sight-visibility
8
Performance tracking
8
Job Requisition Management
6
Company Website Posting
7
Publish to Social Media
5
Job Search Site Posting
7
Duplicate Candidate Prevention
4
Applicant Tracking
4
Notifications and Alerts
5

UKG Pro (formerly Ultimate Software UltiPro) Training

  • Online training
  • in-person training
  • no training
I love that it's free and flexible. Some of it could have a little more hands-on and have trainers that can answer different scenarios. If the trainer has not been a user, they may not always be able to relate. In most cases they do a great job at answering questions.
I was not at the organization when in-person training was provided, so I cannot answer this question.