Ultimate and Professional UltiPro Review
October 17, 2018
Ultimate and Professional UltiPro Review
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with UltiPro
We use UltiPro to manage our timesheets, sick leave balances, current pay statements, and benefits enrollment. It is truly a jack of all trades when it comes to providing information about the terms of my employment with the company, which is something sorely needed by many other places who may have a more fragmented environment--benefits here, compensation here, time management over there, etc. Plus, we have UltiPro plugged into SSO for even more convenience. I log in once at work and I can instantly access anything HR-related that I may need, not just limited to comp. Things like HR policies and beneficiary information are also nested in the menus, making it a one-stop shop for all things HR.
- I like the time tracking for hourly employees in UltiPro. No nonsense numbers--8 hours, 6.5 hours, things like that. No clocking in or out. Plus, it allows you to calculate your expected pay (if you are hourly) by adding the hours together and projecting a before-tax number.
- Requesting sick and vacation time is quite easy. You see your balance up front and make simple mathematical deductions from a rolling balance. Similar to the time tracking function, there is no guess work with what "one day" of time means. If you need 4 hours, take 4. If you need more or less, adjust accordingly.
- Approvals are really simple and transparent in UltiPro. I know who should be approving my timecard and vacation requests, and I am notified immedeatly when they have done so. I can also "remind" someone to look at a request, which sends them an email reminder that I have a pending approval in the queue. This simplifies things for us when it comes to the end of the pay period and we have an error that went unnoticed until after the final card is submitted. If the "un-submit" button is unavailable, you can simply message your approver through the software and rest easy knowing that the process cannot complete erroneously now that you have brought attention to whatever mistake may have been made.
- The UI isn't fantastic. Buttons are a bit spread out and do not scale to the size of a larger screen because of the way they are embedded, and it runs a little differently in every browser you use. I use Chrome and have few issues, but I've heard mixed things from peers who use Safari and Firefox. Additionally, the only place it is "optimized" is apparently Internet Explorer, according to our HR administrators. In my experience, this can make SaaS offerings harder for companies to adopt due to limited flexibility across a mixed environment.
- I am not wild about their self help menus. In any given menu, there will be something in the sidebar detailing what you can do in that menu and a link to s self-help video. The videos tend to be on the generic side, focusing more on how to use the site rather than how to do the task you actually set out to do (request time off, apply sick balance, enter benefits info, etc). So what ends up happening is that it's easier to click all the buttons you can see and use trial/error to figure out how to do something rather than watching a video about a generic deployment doing a generic task with no actual detail or walkthrough.
- The Organizational Chart function leaves much to be desired. Navigation is one-dimensional, the cursor indicates clickable items when nothing is in fact clickable (in Chrome, anyway), and similar to the UI in general the screen does not scale dynamically, leaving too much space between people and a screen too large to view without scrolling.
- Time savings
- Consolidating HR administration under a single solution
There is no question about UltiPro's utility--it's a Swiss army knife of functionality across so much of an organization, specifically orgs that tend to be highly visible/impactful but more reserved and set in their ways. It is easy to interface with teams like HR, Finance, and Recruiting because we are all sharing the same tool, and therefore speaking in similar terms. No sending emails into the abyss, no mysterious timecard corrections, no wondering about whether you and your manager are on the same page about your performance. UltiPro greases a lot of wheels for the various business units across my company.
UltiPro is in a league of its own when it comes to just how many functions it provides and how well it works with multiple stakeholders. Other programs tend to favor admins, users, or simply do not have a depth of functionality when it comes to tracking and displaying rich information about employee status or performance. UltiPro's interface is not perfect, but it blows both Kronos and ADP out of the water regardless of that fact.