VIsta HRMS, is it right for your company?
Updated March 18, 2015

VIsta HRMS, is it right for your company?

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

Overall Satisfaction with Vista HRMS

On the front face of the business our employees would say that Vista HRMS is our time and attendance system. Behind the scenes, Human Resources and Payroll use it for our system of record. All employees are stored in Vista HRMS and our benefits, leave accruals, time keeping and payroll are run through Vista HRMS. This is good for us because it keeps all of our information on one platform and I am not having to toggle between programs to run payroll or check employee records and history. .
  • Vista HRMS is extremely configurable. It's completely adaptable to your specific business needs.
  • Security is very robust and you have the ability to easily create and adjust access amongst security groups
  • I feel like the payroll process is pretty simple and the system will generate multiple reports for each step so you are able to verify information along the way. You can rerun steps and processes as many times necessary until all your data is accurate and ties out to your business standards. This is always a welcome feature before you hit that magical 'pay' button!
  • Time entry is very manual, you have to be very specific in your time entry by inserting the colon and also the AM/PM. Military time entry will work if you're settings are set to accept military time entry. A time punch button would be a great addition to this module, or a quick drop down option of base hour or half hour entries.
  • Currently, the system allows employees to enter more leave accrual time then they have available. This error does generate on reports when payroll is run, however as a business rule we do follow up with each individual who has gone over and see if they would like those hours moved over to other available accruals or let them know that it will be unpaid if no other accrual balances exist. I believe you can configure a 'User Exit' to notify employees as soon as they enter the time in that those hours are not available, however it is not part of the base system. This would be a helpful addition and would save quite a bit of time on the follow up during payroll processing.
  • I was not here during implementation of this product, so I am not sure of the training that our administrators received at the time. However I have not had much luck in finding best practices for the system or training manuals. My knowledge has come through trial and error and calling our hosted support team to help walk me through issues. More FAQ material or even module training materials would be great for newly hired employees who need to have access to Vista HRMS in more than a basic time entry capacity.
  • It has greatly increased our payroll processing time. We can do it all in house and prior to Vista HRMS our timekeeping was done on excel spreadsheets! No one is trying to manually calculate overtime for each employee anymore.
  • Reporting data from Vista HRMS is easily done with Crystal Reports, this has helped us improve on multiple efficiencies including posting to our general ledger, tying out our 401K files and state employment surveys. If the data requested has anything to do with fields that are used in Vista HRMS, I can definitely create a report on it!
I wasn't part of the implementation team for selection of Vista HRMS, but the feedback that I received was that this was the most robust, configurable product on the market for the price range we were looking to spend. No software is perfect, but Vista HRMS does suit our needs and there is always room to enhance the product when you have time, skills and some money for customs to be put in place if you are unable to do them yourself.
I have had the opportunity to work with many other Payroll and HR software programs and none of them were as inclusive as Vista HRMS. We always had issues with syncs and integrations between the programs and at times we even had dedicated employees who did the exact same data entry in multiple different systems. This of course is inefficient as well as leaves quite a bit of room for human error.
You have the option of taking the system in house or being a hosted client. Figure out what resources your IT department has to spare, if you will have a dedicated administrator who will do all the upgrades and enhancements or if you will be job sharing those responsibilities. Like all software, Vista HRMS has multiple upgrades a year. You will need someone or a team of a few individuals to test these upgrades out and be able to take on a role of administrator, technology consultant or front end user and make sure these upgrades are working from all angles.
Vista HRMS really is a good product for keeping all HR and Payroll related records in one system, I just stress the fact that you have to have someone on hand who wants to own the product and be willing to learn as much as possible. The more you put into this product, the more you will get out of it.

Using Vista HRMS

I feel so invested in Vista HRMS that I don't really want to try other options. I know we as an organization are not using this product to it's full potential and that is just due to us lacking the resources to be able to invest the time into breaking it apart and making it work to the best ability for us. The system works great as is, but there are a lot of implementations we can put into place to help us out even more. For example, we would love to start using Workflow to create more efficiencies. I personally have a very good relationship with our hosted vendor who supports Vista HRMS and can help me with any issues and concerns, this is a big part of the reason that I would renew with this product and continue to be an advocate for Vista HRMS.