27Feb/0815
Why ADP PayForce sucks – again!
I received a lot of emails from other companies thinking about PayForce after I wrote this humble opinion. Since questions were mostly around specific issues, I decided to elaborate more on this topic and provide some facts. So, here is what I came up with...
ADP will try to sell PayForce to you because:
- "PayForce is a web-based hosted solution and this is the future of all applications". Don't ever believe that web-based hosted solutions are the future. Maybe for small companies and mom-and-pop shops it is, but that's about it. Always have your data available, sitting right next to you, especially if you want to interface it with another application or create custom reports via external tools.
- "PayForce's availability is 99+%". Yeah right. If I counted the number of times PayForce was down, you would be surprised. We've had occurrences when PayForce services were down on the day of payroll!
- "PayForce is robust and access time is very fast". Another sales pitch. It is slow, because PayForce databases are on a "shared" hosting. This means your database resides together with a lot of other companies. How slow is it you might ask? I've had cases when a single transaction took more than 10 minutes to execute.
- "You can access your data at any time through our advanced database tools". The "advanced database tools" ADP provides is a web-based Crystal front-end (called ePortfolio) with stripped out functionality. You can only export your data to Excel (no CSV support) and you know what happens to Excel when you have more than 65 thousand rows... Oh yeah, if the query pulls more than 150 rows, expect Crystal to time out and die. And the Crystal front-end is even slower than PayForce.
- "You own your data and we can provide it to you at any time". When we were ready to finally say goodbye to PayForce, our account rep told us that we needed to extract everything through Crystal. Come again?! Extract data from 1000 tables via custom SQL queries? You gotta be kidding me! All I'm asking for is a database dump. Any SQL database can do it. No, I do not need your PLSQL code - all I care about is my data. Guess what - ADP will not give you a database dump. This means that you have to handpick the data you need and extract it one by one. And expect ADP to delete your database once you part ways. They don't have a "luxury" of keeping unnecessary data. Of course they offered to write custom queries in Crystal and extract everything we need, but at a "not-so-affordable" price. I had to fight my way through and requested to talk to their DB admin group. ADP ended up connecting me to someone who works at the data center and the lady told me that they do not extract data for customers and she was clueless about a database dump. So much for owning your data... The only option is to pay ADP a monthly fee to access your data in "read-only" mode.
- "PayForce has excellent reporting". Pretty much all of the reports had to be custom-built for us because PayForce doesn't have the ones we needed. Did I mention that they charge for each one separately? And it's not cheap either.
- "Our payroll services are outstanding and very accurate". Hmm...everything from incorrect state/local taxes all the way to payroll services sending checks to wrong locations. And ADP will not take any legal/financial responsibility when they screw up. When they screw up - it's your fault, end of story.
- "PayForce is very user-friendly and you can access your data directly through the front-end". PayForce has the most ridiculous infrastructure. Apparently the data on the front-end is not 100% accurate - the accurate data resides on their "mainframe". User-friendly? Give me a break!
- "PayForce runs on industry-standard Java, which is robust and efficient". Do you know what a memory leak is? It's OK for PayForce to eat up to 512 MB of RAM and crash IE. You simply ignore those and add more memory. And by the way, ADP loves rolling out new versions of Java (forced install), so it's OK when you see 5 different versions of Java installed on a client's machine.
- "Administering users and groups in PayForce is very easy". Ask our Director of HR and I'm sure she would love to share the pain. Oh yeah, I forgot about system upgrades when you have to go back and redo the security for all users. This one cracks me up - you must provide BOTH login and password in caps (uppercase). Long live caps lock!
- "Data is consistent and accurate throughout the database". Love this one. It's OK for one person to share the same ID with another. It's OK that vital data is missing - ADP just works.
There is a lot more to this, but I'm not going to waste more time writing about PayForce. I'm glad we are moving away from this software.
If ADP is trying to sell PayForce to your company - run while you can!
P.S. Typing "payforce review", "adp payforce review" and "adp is evil" in google returns my page as the first result :)
Nasim Mansurov is a professional photographer based out of Denver, Colorado. He is the author and founder of The Mansurovs, along with a number of other online resources. Read more about Nasim here.
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03/27/2008 - 15:08
Called in payroll correctly on 03/18/08
payroll came in 03/19/08
checks and DD(direct Deposit) stubs were distributed to employees.
report came to accounting
accounting notices the dates are wrong. dollar amounts are correct just check date 3/25 rather than 3/20.
called Fernando with ADP
First he was rude and wanted to take the time to tell me it was all my fault. After I told him to fix it, he did the following.
he said the DD would need to be hand written by us, and he would credit back to us that amount ($5960.60)
the actual checks (not DD) were already in the hands of the employees and some already deposited into their banks
so we could not get them back from the employees, he said we should only need to deal with the DD.
3/27 I noticed that ADP credited the entire payroll back to our account.($12,509.79) This might mean that the ADP checks that the employees deposited into their accounts are not going to clear.
Called ADP with this problem and they said ……
They can and will re-instate the checks but it takes 72 hours to get this done. this might mean some checks will be returned. this is very frustrating!!
I am not sure what to do…. MIGHT??
They did re-instate it and they show no checks being cashed so far so we MIGHT have caught it in time. This is just a warning because I don’t trust them.
Please ask or explain this to the employees listed above. They most likely will not have any problems but please ask them to call their banks and be sure.
If the check was returned then ADP will give them any charges for the return and any other charges that happened because of this problem.
If the checks were returned we will need to write hand check out of our account to replace them and then get a refund from ADP.
05/06/2008 - 16:22
Hi Nasim,
Im fairly new to this, and i know your comments about payforce is probably true. I just finished school, but they never of course taught us this program for accounting, but do you know how i can learn the program without the bs of ADP. Thanks in advance Nasim..
-Sarah
saromh@gmail.com
07/14/2008 - 07:25
And god help you if you’re an eTime end user – I am unlucky enough to have been set up to use this at my company. When I get in in the morning, my machine takes a long-ish but reasonable 4 minutes to boot up. Fine. But then I fire up firefox and try to load etime, and the goddamn thing takes 10 minutes to load. That is absolutely unacceptable. The entire thing is build in Java and is buggy as hell. After taking the 10 minutes, the program will crash firefox, and will only work again after restarting the browser. I lose about $5 every day just waiting for this thing to get off its ass and go. That’s 30 dollars per week, just because some idiot at ADP decided to run authentication in a java applet that takes up 26 MEGABYTES of ram just to load up. Multiply these losses, and the many tax mistakes I expect they’re making, by the hourly workers of a whole company, and you’re looking at millions of dollars.
This company should be sued for making such a piss poor product.
08/31/2008 - 21:43
Hey guys, you should look into dealing with a small business payroll company. Check out http://www.PayrollAccountantLive.com. Let me know what you think!
10/26/2008 - 19:45
Or just call Paychex
10/29/2008 - 07:22
I’m trying to identify what the various Payforce access codes are – F, V, C, A, etc. Can you provide any insight or direction as to where I can find this information?
11/14/2008 - 12:07
Right from the first sales meeting the rep said that we could get a master employee file download automatically through a FTP feature. During implimentation no one new what i was talking about and the sale rep appoligized for the misunderstanding. Basically lied to get us upgraded from the in house PC Payroll. Basically everything i’ve read on this site is true. I’m surprised i still get a check every two week.
12/12/2008 - 23:09
I work for a pretty big company, 3500 employees, We implimented e-time and HR Anytime. What a joke, We has two payroll clerks quit because of the lack of communication from ADP and being told that it was their fault it wasn’t working. We are doing it wrong. I don’t see why people keep buying into the ADP BS. With every new roll out we are told this is user friendly and should take no time to push through. I think if something is user friendly, it should not come with a six inch manual and seperate training classes that you are charged an arm and a leg per individual to attend.
12/28/2008 - 19:27
Are you looking for a payroll company that gives you the benefits of flexibility and control over your own payroll information? Complete access of prior years information? Reply back.
02/02/2009 - 22:28
I work at a company with 1500 employees across the US, in approx. 15 states. We upgraded to PayForce 1 1/2 years ago – and it is a terrible, slow system. While we’ve had better luck with support than you had, the system has major technical flaws. I can’t wait to get off PayForce, I wish we’d never had converted.
02/04/2009 - 10:05
I am CEO of Paylocity, America’s leading independent provider of payroll and HR solutions to mid-sized businesses. I found this site by accident because I was helping a client of ours convert off of Payforce. We have a true web-based solution designed for mid-market companies. I would highly suggest it as an alternative if you are unhappy with PayForce. Our service is excpetional and we have twice been named the #1 independent payroll provider in America. Our website is http://www.paylocity.com if you would like more information on our company.
02/07/2009 - 02:06
Steve interesting article on INC.
02/14/2009 - 19:49
Don’t you guys have Payroll Software that could be used for all your Payroll needs on your Local Server? How about SAGE, does SAGE operate in US?
07/08/2009 - 08:39
I’m unhappy with Payforce from a support standpoint. Every month they change something that makes it break. Every month users call us with problems getting in. We can’t call ADP for support; only the corporate payroll people can, and they don’t know how to troubleshoot things on the server end.
08/06/2009 - 07:31
Hi all! I work for HS%A Payroll in Chicago, and I hear the horror stories from ADP clients day in and day out. If you are ready to see what the best technology solution and direct dial support can do for you, give me a call at 800-424-7526, ext 278, or take a look at our website – http://www.hsapayroll.com. Thanks!