APS is a national workforce management and cloud-based HR solution provider. The platform includes core HR, payroll, time and attendance (including manager and employee self-service), compliance tools, and onboarding.
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Paylocity
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Paylocity provides 24/7 access to your online payroll and human resource data management. Paylocity offers highly customizable payroll functionality, as well as HR, benefits administration, and time and talent management programs.
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Pricing
APS Payroll
Paylocity
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
APS Payroll
Paylocity
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
Our Payroll solution is offered as a standalone service, but additional solutions must be used in conjunction with our Payroll solution. This ensures the best possible user experience for our customers.
Paylocity is a better option in pretty much every single way. I think APS is a fairly new product so they have a lot of issues to figure out. They didn't even have functionality for effective dates which is a pretty important thing to have in a HR/payroll system
I think that APS Online is scalable to any organization. It's a wonderful product and I have had so many managers that work with me that feel the same way. We haven't been with them quite a year yet but since we've started it has made a world of difference for us. Things to ask about- 1- Do they specialize in or can they accommodate states that you are working in and their various rules? 2- What type of customer service? Do they have a call center or do they have a designated person like APS? 3- How long do your reports stay in the system? (ADP "archived" theirs after a year so we couldn't reach them)
Onboarding once configured has made our hiring process a smooth transition into employee database that encompasses HR & Payroll as well as Time & Labor for timekeeping purposes. And like all companies these days - finding qualified, dedicated employees and enough of them is difficult for Paylocity as well
It's fast and intuitive. Our previous contractors were ADP and Paychex and neither were intuitive. Our payroll runs have less errors now than with previous vendors. Payroll prep time is down from 5 hours with ADP to 2 hours with APS for the HR Manager.
The limiters are great. I'm always afraid of that error that no one caught. Let's assume that you add a $200 limiter to overtime. Any time that a staff member is about to receive more than $200 in overtime for that pay period, a red flag goes up for the HR manager to double check.
We have 3 programs in public schools that block certain ports. APS has a 2nd feature using GPS so that staff can only check in for their shift while they are in the designated GPS range. Great for someone who has to report to a remote location. Just add the GPS coordinates and they can't check until they get to the project.
The payroll software is top notch. Recruitment module has been great. I think the workflow and the way you can customize all of the features of the recruitment module is awesome. Same thing with performance, you can really tailor everything to your specific company needs.
Reporting - We have six different business units and the reporting is separate for all three. Most reporting I do requires information from all business units so am running six reports and then copying and pasting to get the report I need.
Multi-state taxes - We have a number of employees who live in New York and work in New Jersey. APS OnLine is designed to accommodate one state withholding so ability to have "worked in" state and "lived in" state taxes withheld went away. This was a shortfall.
The Carrier connection setup took much longer than expected. After a year, we are still having some issues with some items transferring over to the GL.
The CA overtime calculation does not calculate after 8 hours per day, only on the 40 per week so we override each week.
Reporting - when running Benefit reports, it recognizes employees who formerly carried the plan but may have dropped it. To get around this, we have to delete off the employee's record so the history is not readily available.
No, I know they're working on implementing it so that we can control our own GL that I'm looking forward to. That is one thing that I feel like has been missing, so I'm happy to see them addressing it.
We went through a couple of different service reps, but that's been my only issue. The problem is a couple of the service reps.
I have been using the system for over a year now and feel more comfortable with the functionality of it. I have just recently implemented the benefit administration portion.
We have had many issues with the way our platform was set up at implementation that still continue to plague us. In addition, our benefits, in particular our FSA, have been mis-managed causing a balance due from an employee (and also a lot of work for our accounting and HR team, as well as stress for the employee). Our service rep continues to answer incorrectly on many fronts (original response is usually check out this paylocity article, vs. helping) and recently our COBRA management was mishandled (not adding Dental to a person on Cobra who had requested it). So- all in all...we are not particularly happy w/ Paylocity
In general, it's a great system to use. We were looking for simplicity and ease of use and have received raves from our employees in their ability to access and make use of the system. There is still so much more that we have yet to gain as we continue working through each of the modules.
I find Paylocity to be almost too robust so that its functionalities are sometimes too complex to use. Sometimes it appears that they don't get a user's experience and keep a software developers mindset which doesn't always work well with users that are not at their technical level of expertise. A perfect example is the way the payroll dashboard USED to look compared to the recent update
Paylocity support is always available and I never have to wait endlessly on hold. If our dedicated account manage is not available, there is an entire team assigned to our account. Every one of them is knowledgeable about our organization and Paylocity's process.
I had to learn APS on my own, and the support team held my hand. They are still there when I have an occasional question. Anytime I need support, I can call my rep or send an email and help is on the way, without failure. The support team is awesome
Everyone wants immediate assistance. Awaiting a response from an email only to ask 2-3 more questions is time consuming. Within the first six months of setup, I would rather respond back to the instructors who provided me the training in each category of my contract.
I didn't have in-person training, but I'm sure it was just as great as any other training/assistance Paylocity provides. Paylocity customer service is always available. You never have to be on hold and their answers are always accurate and timely. Documents in the help section are helpful as well. My in-person training was conducted y one of our employees who was involved in the initial set-up and training of all employees. She was excellent.
The training was live online, but was with a group of other companies. We did not receive any personalized training with our team. Whenever we would ask for training, we would be sent a peak article link or a video. It felt like the reps we dealt with didn't know the answer to the questions.
It would have been helpful to understand the phases of the implementation up front so I could have prepared differently for enrollments, billing, and transfer of information to payroll. At the end of the day, I'm happy with the selection and the system and anticipate I will like it better as we go along. We have done a number of other system implementations in the past few years, and this has been pretty painless, however, I've had a few surprises.
I had gone through an implementation process of another HR platform (Paycom) in my previous job and was traumatized, it was painful. I was surprised how easy and fast it was with Paylocity, the team was very helpful and set us up for success
Paychex was probably the best system, but the constant shifting of support teams caused a loss of institutional knowledge every time. ADP was impersonal and support phone calls almost always went overseas. The lack of knowledge of the support service was disturbing. It was hoped that APS would provide a good system with quality support. Support normally isn't bad other than the journal entry.
We've used Paychex. They used something in Sage before I used it. We use a ADP as well. And I think Sage, I think those three. I've been with the organization for almost seven years and we've been through three different payroll programs I think it was Sage, ADP within a couple of years. And then we got on to Paylocity and I think we've been in here for four or five years and we're not changing.
We were able to transition quickly and continue to successfully hire and onboard new hires for several Clubs that opened within weeks of moving to APS.
We do struggle a bit with the ease of reporting simply because our locations are all under separate EIN and that can make it difficult to easily combine data queried under custom reports, so the volume of reporting that I might wish to be able to push through weekly in order to help address 'real time' trends is not always available.
The lack of effective dating for position and wage changes does mean that HR and available APS data is not 'real time' accurate and that HR does need to return to the system to update changes well after-the-fact, which is not ideal.
I think there's a lot of data that we're capturing and honestly the consistency of being able to automate a lot of processes, which frees up my time to really deal with my employees at the level that they need me to. And so it frees up that admin task that before Paylocity or having to do by hand or a little bit more of a manual process.
