UltiPro Payroll is a top alternative for US and Canada
August 23, 2019

UltiPro Payroll is a top alternative for US and Canada

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with UltiPro

We use UltiPro Payroll for 77,000 employees in the US (we're in 41 states & 63 Tax jurisdictions) and 1,500 in Canada (we're in 4 provinces). We have 10 component companies (different legal entities with their own FEINs). Workday is our HCM (for most of our HR needs) and Kronos is our time-tracking system. For other modules we use internally developed systems and tools.
  • It is flexible and adaptable to our needs. The Customs Team can develop customization in case standard functionality is not available. This ensures that whenever we need functionality that is not available "out-of-the-box", we can get it developed at a reasonable cost to us and meet our business needs.
  • Ex-employees can easily access their payroll and tax records indefinitely, at no extra cost to us.
  • The Ultimate Software support team is phenomenal and will work tirelessly to fix any issues, even when they may have been caused by us.
  • "Guided adjustments" is sorely needed for a number of scenarios. It is currently very manual and time-consuming to make adjustments to paychecks (say, to move taxes from one state to another or to refund FICA for employees who should have been exempt). Currently there is some limited functionality and I understand more will come soon, but "I feel it is too little, too late". We should be able to backdate certain transactions very easily and do "bulk" updates.
  • We should be able to run multiple payroll sessions in parallel as standard functionality (e.g.regular payroll and stock payroll).
  • I'd like to see the use of Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence to help us catch errors and make our approvals a lot easier to accomplish. I should only have to dig deeper in certain areas, if something "out of the normal" comes up.
  • A common feature requested by our employees is the ability (self-service) to get their pay statements in spreadsheet format.
  • Costs savings
  • Time savings
  • Security and peace of mind
  • Cost savings: UltiPro is a price-competitive payroll solution, so we're happy with it.
  • Time savings: we have been able to reduce the time it takes us to run regular payroll from 4 to 2 days
  • Security and peace of mind: after implementing single signon, we feel very secure about access controls.
Workday Payroll is not at the same level of Ultipro and Workday as a company are not flexible and adaptable, so it would be hard to fulfill our business needs if we moved to Workday Payroll.

SAP is a very comprehensive solution but would not be as flexible for our current needs and we would require a much bigger technical team to manage an SAP payroll implementation.
When we process 150,000 records (e.g.for our stock payroll), Ultipro can be really slow, so some urgent performance improvements are needed.
The technical team at Ultimate Software is great, but they should partner more with our payroll processors (we utilize UMS - Ultimate Software Managed Services) to understand our challenges.

Sometimes it is hard to get technical resources allocated to some of our Service Requests, which can delay implementation of new customized features and/or solutions.
Following the recent Tax Law changes in the US, the IRS published their guidelines on Thursday and when we opened payroll on Monday we were already compliant with the changes (e.g.supplemental tax rate dropped from 25% / 39.6% to 22% / 27%). They were extremely responsive and worked around the clock to get this rolled out to us, which was important because we paid annual bonuses during that week.
For companies operating from US and Canada, UltiPro is an excellent solution. For companies operating in multiple countries/geographies, UltiPro still lacks behind some of their main competitors.

UKG Pro Feature Ratings

Employee demographic data
Not Rated
Employment history
Not Rated
Job profiles and administration
Not Rated
Workflow for transfers, promotions, pay raises, etc.
Not Rated
Organizational charting
Not Rated
Organization and location management
Not Rated
Compliance data (COBRA, OSHA, etc.)
Not Rated
Pay calculation
10
Direct deposit files
10
View and generate pay and benefit information
8
Report builder
8