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We have had numerous problems with UltiPro's eedtvstartdate field, which is only visible to those who work at Ultimate. According to my account manager, this has been a known issue for several years. The problem is that the eedtvstartdate field actually controls a user's ability to add a deduction code to an employee's record despite the effective date fields available. If payroll discovers that a deduction code needs to be added to a certain employee who never had that specific deduction code assigned to him/her in the past while attempting to process a pay period that has already ended, we need to contact Ultimate so that they can run an SQL script to fix this field so that we can assign it to the employee. The eedtvstartdate field is the true effective date that customers cannot see or update and it always matches the date the code was entered.

Our 2015 benefits enrollment was very problematic due to a programming change that Ultimate implemented in the middle of our open enrollment period and their ineffectual attempts to resolve our initial issue, which generated additional issues. All of the elections made by our the hourly employees who had completed open enrollment up to that point (over 500) were no longer visible. Although Ultimate assured us that this was a display issue when we initially called, there was no way for our HRIS team or our employees to view their already completed elections and for our benefits team to determine who had completed their enrollments. Ultimate's attempts to fix this issue resulted in duplicate (and even triplicate) enrollment elections, inconsistent coverage level/dependent elections (e.g., family or spouse coverage elected without any dependents specified), and inconsistent FSA elections (e.g., dependent care annual election of $5,000 with $0.00 biweekly cost). Additionally, certain employees who had not yet enrolled were not able to move from their medical to dental election screen or even view the medical plan option available. When employees were fixed on an individual employee and plan basis, those same employees then had problems with their subsequent plan elections, experiencing the same issues with dental enrollment as they had with medical. Both reports and confirmation statements were incorrect so all elections had to be reviewed manually. Those that could actually get through their online enrollment had confirmation statements indicating that they had no current 2014 coverage even though they had been enrolled throughout the entire year. We ended up using paper forms for FSA elections that were later manually entered into UltiPro since the benefits team did not see the system as reliable enough. It took more than a month to work out all of these data issues so we were not able to meet our vendors' deadlines for providing our open enrollment files.

When we have contacted the support center, we have often been given incorrect or incomplete information. For example, when we updated one of our accrual plans, as instructed by Ultimate, we ended up with duplicate accrual records for one individual. This issue appeared during our final stages of payroll processing, but at the time, we did not know that it was related to the recent accrual/PTO plan change we had made while speaking to one of Ultimate's experts. When we called the Rapid Response line that handles urgent payroll issues, the representative "fixed" our immediate issue but did not inform us that her "fix" would delete all accrual information from pay statements for any employee with direct deposit. This impacted over 800 employees. When trying to prevent this same issue from occurring again for the next pay period, we were finally informed that there is an issue with the PTO plan configuration so that the old row of accrual rule information still exists even though it is hidden from the customer. None of the representatives we spoke to were aware of this issue and it was not documented so that customers would know that they would need to completely delete their existing accrual rule information before adding new information.

We also have many problems when we pay Ultimate for their expensive customizations. For example, our Canadian team was working with an integration consultant to make a change to the Canadian company only and were specifically instructed to not impact the US company. However, we discovered that our integration from core to Time & Attendance for terminated employees was no longer working, which may have caused us to pay terminated employees for holidays if we had not caught the error ourselves. Another example would be our custom 401(k) payroll remittance export file. Our tax reconciliation entries were reducing our gross wages even though these reconciliation adjustments were simply changes to a tax code and not changes to employee wages. The integration told us that since we did not adequately define gross wages, which is not a company-specific concept, that they did not know to exclude tax reconciliation transactions.