ADP Workforce Now is a cloud-based HR platform for mid-sized businesses. It features customizable modules of various HR services that businesses can tailor to their specific needs, as well as regulatory monitoring and alerts to help businesses remain compliant.
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Ascentis (discontinued)
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Ascentis HR uses web-based management programs to help automate complex HR processes. Ascentis’ other services included customizable payroll, time and attendance and recruiting modules. Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022, and will be discontinued.
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Pricing
ADP Workforce Now
Ascentis (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Essential
Contact sales team
Enhanced
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Complete
Contact sales team
HR Pro
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Payroll Essentials
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HR Plus
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Hiring Advantage
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Performance Plus
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No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ADP Workforce Now
Ascentis (discontinued)
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
Please contact ADP for a product demo and ask about a hands-on "test drive" of Workforce Now.
well suited for folks in manufacturing or building (jobs and tasks required). Good for small and big business, ease of forming to what you want rather then getting oversold on items that you will not use. Lots of training options available
In working with Ascentis in payroll, the program makes my job so much easier. I am new to this position and the learning process has been so much easier with this product than those in the past. I appreciate the patience I am given when I call in for assistance as well.
Easy to use software. I have had several new HR employees comment on how easy the system is to learn!
Problem Solving- Ascentis is always problem solving! When we were in the process of selecting a new payroll company, we needed unemployment claims management assistance for our locations, something Ascentis did not currently offer. The sales rep went out of his way to find a unemployment claims management company that would work with Ascentis and us. That company has helped us keep an 80% win rate for our claims!
User conference- Engage is an awesome way to learn more about the products Ascentis has available as well and meet up with the staff you work with every day!
Updating the system so it is one platform and not two.
Create changes to the benefit enrollment process and upgrade the system so hire dates do not need to be changed to trigger benefits for status changes.
Focus updates on HR Admin, mobile application, ATS and transitioning to one platform. Larger areas of focus have been on the payroll portion of the system with a few updates to other areas.
When something is broken, quicker turn time on fixing the issue.
We are happy with the service and options offered by ADP. Although the cost is a bit high for a not-for-profit organization, it is essential that we have multi-jurisdictional support for the 20 plus states where employees work and reside. As our company is diminishing in size, we may need to look at making a change to conserve costs. At this time, that would be the only reason we would not renew our WFN contract.
If I were given the opportunity to select a new system, Ascentis would definitely be a strong contender. It links together the functions much more seamlessly than other systems I have used. By far the best part though is the customer support after implementation, this is where many companies fail. It was very appreciated that even after every module went live the service level was still high.
Lack of documentation and test environment make it extremely difficult to deploy work processes through the system. While there are a handful of things throughout the system that work well, particularly from an employee's perspective, many tasks, which would be simple for practitioner users in other systems, require these users to ask for administrator support. Additionally, the ghosts in the ADP machine cause established process (e.g. automated report delivery) to stop working with no notice and no error report.
Employees and Management all love this product, as the ease of use is great! The app makes it very user friendly, as things can be done from cell phones anywhere at any time! Our Field Service Technicians love that they can clock in and out, etc., from any location, and that their time can be approved accordingly.
They normally give you notice when an update will affect the use of the system. Otherwise, when we have an error , we send a message to the support team. Sometimes someone will get right back with you and sometimes it takes a while.
Overall, I think the functionality of the program works pretty well. Sometimes, certain browsers do not work well for the policy function of ADP, but that is the only issue thus far
Most of it is not local, which impacts barriers and customs. I do think they know a lot, but not the cohesive piece. Some naturally know more about certain things than others. The payroll section should be broken out more because payroll is a big topic with many problems, so it can be hard to get the right person who can actually help you.
Support is attentive and quick to answer the call and get the answer for you. If they for any reason cannot answer right then, they are back to you within a day and always seem to have a sense of urgency. You truly get the impression that they are aiming to make you happy.
In-person training was pretty good - I think this significantly depends on the trainer. Our trainer was really good and showed what ADP can do - but I know that all trainers are not the same - and this truly makes such as difference. Overall, our training went pretty well.
First, to clarify our "in-person" training was done mainly through Web-X meetings and conference calls. It was the closest thing we got to as far as an "in-person" training for this software. However, for the large majority of it, this type of training worked out well. We were able to share our screens and the trainer was able to share his/her screen. We could follow along with what we were doing in our database in real time and see how different functions worked and how manipulating our information could produce different results. It was also nice in that it provided for real-time results if something hadn't been coded correctly or we were having issues as to why something wasn't working the way we thought it should be. However, it did have some downsides in that we often had to rely on a conference phone and that made it difficult to hear people on both sides. Also, sometimes the trainers had internet difficulties when working from home and that caused issues with the WebX meetings.
At the time training was not as expansive as it is now. If it could go wrong it did for me so the process was difficult and lengthy. I needed to have more in person walkthroughs of things to ensure the transition was done correctly. Not sure what else I can say, we were part of the initial move to Workforce Now when it was introduced.
Ascentis HR has a number of online training videos to watch on a number of different topics. I gave it a lower rating because there is not much interactivity with the videos and it seems to cater to really only one or two learning styles. Plus, one has to be pretty motivated to go to a separate area to access the videos and then pull up a specific one to watch it and then learn. From my experience, people know that they are there, many just don't take the time and effort to go find them and actually watch them - especially since the username and password are different from their normal username and password.
Either assign more than one specialist to the implementation process, or assign less clients to the implementation specialist. The process requires attention to detail and the ability to test and re-test as well as verify the information. It also requires a lot of back and forth between the client ant the implementation specialist, so they need to be readily available during the whole implementation process.
It was very easy to implement, but the customization pieces should really be fleshed out in order to determine the full need of an organization at the time of implementation. I believe if a little more time was spent on the requirements, the recruiting module would not have to be customized again at a cost at a later date.
I also used UltiPro (way back -- it didn't even appear in dropdown). Recommend ADP Workforce Now above all others. Paycor and Paycom were both very clunky. I even helped implement Paycom and could never get it to work how the business needed it to.
Ascentis has far better customer service and the implementation experience was also better. The ability to do a lot of customization is also easier with Ascentis as it's smaller organization. The payroll has positive and negatives compared to ADP but the accuracy is the same in both. Ascentis just started their community site which doesn't have a lot of traffic but hopefully can become more like ADP's community site, which was extremely helpful to me as an administrator.
We have been able to grow with ADP from just a few hundred employees to over 10,000 so it's actually very scalable for payroll usage. We do not use the benefits and onboarding offerings for most of our employees but they are built to scale easily enough for when our corporate team has over 1,000 FTE.
ADP Workforce Now handles all of our tax filing which frees up our time to do other things. They keep us compliant communicating updates on a timely basis.
Calculates payrolls accurately. Our management and employees have built a level of confidence due to the ease of pulling statements, year end documents etc.
A really nice feature is the follow up email what a change has been made to banking information. There were a couple of times the employee did not make changes to their account information. This kept their funds from getting routed into the wrong hands.
It has been great to have all of our employee information in one central location, easy access and that the modules communicate/link together. If I change something here, it gets "pushed" to all other modules.
I do not maximize ESS, particularly posting information on the home page because it is so TEDIOUS.
LOVE the app, would love for it to be easier for employees to reset their password to whatever they want vs. the system generated password.
