The WorkForce Suite, by WorkForce Software, is a mobile-first, cloud-based modern workforce management solution with integrated employee communications and collaboration capabilities. The WorkForce Suite aims to help global enterprise organizations optimize their labor, protect against compliance risks, and maximize productivity while building a highly engaged, resilient, and agile workforce.
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Upland PSA
Score 5.8 out of 10
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Upland PSA helps professional services teams grow their business.
Functionality is lacking for anything beyond basic clock in/clock out features. Job costing, scheduling, etc. is clunky and requires high level configuration, and still does not always work as intended. The number of steps required to get data from one location to another is over complicated - should be more streamlined and simple
Tenrox has been the only solution we can find that can make a simple timesheet that basically turns the old Excel timesheet into an online cloud based glorified Excel sheet. No drop downs for employees to pick through and little room for error. The reporting could be great but not in the way we have customized it. The reports are useless most of the time and writing a report is very difficult. If you want a nonprofit adapted timesheet for multiple funders and contracts without any frills or reporting then this is it!
You can create a report combining virtually any field that the application tracks, so in this way it's a very flexible tool. There are also very flexible workflows and security settings within the app so that you can really make it fit your organizational structure, whatever that may be.
You can download the report into Excel and work with the data in Pivot tables to get even more customized reports.
EmpCenter's report features need improvement. While it is nice that the user has several options for the format to receive the report in and with a recent update reports can be scheduled to run and be printed or emailed to the user or someone else of their choosing on a regular basis, daily, weekly, monthly. The reports never seem to have all of the information you need on one report and need a lot of manipulating to get the results you actually need. For example we have reports with employees names that show total hours worked, but don't include rates of pay or the job title. When employees have more than one job or rate for the work they are preforming you don't get that breakdown of information with their total hours worked. Another report includes three ways of reporting the same total hours but don't all round the same so, for example the total clocked hours may show 34.3 hours and the work study hours on the same report that should match round to 34.2. We have asked for certain data to be added to certain reports such as a supervisor name and it seems to be such a task for that to be provided and a high cost we are not getting these request met.
Management of time sheets when a supervisor has many employees is difficult. EmpCenter only allows for one manager to be named for each employee. In most settings this may make sense but in our environment in particular with student employees we often have more than one person who oversee different aspects of that employees work and both need access to their records. In our Housing and Dining department we have three managers who are together overseeing several hundred student employees. One manager may be primarily responsible for the employees pay rates and evaluations while another scheduling and they may not all be working at the same time. Because only one of them can have access to an employee’s time sheet if that person is not in and an employee needs assistance with something in EmpCenter the other managers can't help them. Also the display only shows up to 500 employees or assignments. We have some units who have up to eight different assignments for one employee. These areas will have several employees each with several different assignments which means several individual time sheets. This all will result in more than 500 and the supervisor has to use a search feature to get to the employees who do not display in their more user friendly list. Also this many assignments results in many time sheets and the clock times report separately for each and do not combine into one larger complete time sheet so each must be managed separately. It would be nice if there was a view that combined all hours into one time sheet view. Finally on this note when a supervisor is approving time they can only approve one time sheet per employee at a time so they have to do mass amounts of approvals and ultimately simply don't approve time sheets when they are dealing with so many.
Probably our largest problem is that when we do have programming that is not working properly or aspects of the system that we would like improved it is difficult to get those corrections made and made in a timely manner. I do not work directly with the company, but it has taken a few payroll cycles to get programming fixed for some things causing a lot of manual work in my area to pay employees correctly. If anyone is looking at purchasing this product I advise that they be very clear and detailed upfront with what they are getting and what is included in the cost they are being quoted. Because this is a customizable program you buy an off the shelf basic and the company works with you to price what programming will be done from there. Things we thought were covered we are finding are not and it is very costly to add other programming to our contract. I often feel it is not a high priority for them to resolve problems we are experiencing however it is very important for us and the work we are trying to do.
We also have problems with access to the system in different ways and needing more roles. EmpCenter has a role for a user who only has access to certain activity such as reporting their time and requesting time off, a role as a manager who can approve time off and time sheets and see their employees records, and a super user role who has more administrative access to override things and handle some of the errors and issue we may experience. in my role I am an administrator for several different areas of the campus and need to access the system at a higher level to assist employees and managers but can only have the manager role but with wider access granted. So by this I mean that I see the features a manager sees but am seen as a manager of all employees in several areas on campus where the other manager role is restricted to just that managers employees alone. In this sense I suppose this is a fourth role the system allows, but I can't do any more actions than a manager can i can just see more people. The super user role is not granted because it is at such a higher level that they can actually effect programming and this role is highly restricted so that users don't inadvertently corrupt the program. I feel there needs to be one more layer in between the super user level and the manager level. I would like to be able to delete time when employees have clocked in by mistake and simply want that removed or when there are more minor problems with a record that I can't correct. Also when a manager is out and has not delegated their employees to someone else to manage I would like to be able to make that delegation so that someone in the unit can review, correct and approve time in place of that supervisor who is gone.
Overall we have had many problems with things not working right and trying to get the system to calculate properly, finding ways to get information we need from it, and managing and using it. I am sure these are general growing pains anyone would have when transitioning an entire university to a new electronic system, but it has been a difficult first year. If you are thinking of implementing this program have a good communication plan, someone who is the lead and will get things taken care of when they need to be, and clear roles and responsibilities lined out so that everyone knows who does what and who to go to when there is a problem.
Their customer service is horrible, every email I send they insist on following up with a scheduled phone conference to tell me they can't help me. I have wasted hours on conference calls over the years.
They upgrade their products but none of their upgrades will work with their current customer's system or "customizations". We are stuck with a 5 year old product that will only work with Internet Explorer on a PC and only when the browser is in compatibility mode. Even this functionality is touch and go.
They have continuously failed to make time off accruals for a semi-monthly payroll a possibility.
Anytime you ask them to upgrade you to their latest product they first tell you that will be another $3,000 and then they find out their upgrade isn't compatible with your settings.
After spending close to 5 years to decide on which payroll product to acquire for our University, I cannot image we would switch now that we have it in use.
I am not in charge of renewing the Tenrox contract. However, if it was up to me, I would renew in a heartbeat. Tenrox is an asset to our organization and it keeps us focused. I am not aware of other products similar to Tenrox that provide the depth that they do.
I feel like if the user interface could combine time and expense for users to be entered on one screen rather than two completely separate locations it would greatly improve usability. If the expense entry process could be improved completely, it would greatly improve the usability as well. Everything else within Tenrox, makes everything very user friendly.
The support team is always very helpful and strives to ensure they have met your needs and corrected your issues in a timely manner. If they need more information or cannot recreate the issue themselves, then they will follow-up to gather the necessary data themselves. They are constantly striving to meet the needs of all users and understand so many different industries and types of environments out there, it is very impressive.
The main thing with implementation is to make sure you have taken full advantage of the "sandbox testing" site that Tenrox provides to you during development. Try out every scenario you can think of, have other people enter information if needed, so that you can make sure you have not missed any big items. If you have the opportunity, roll out implementation to small groups of users. Depending on how your company is set up, I would choose groups that are not all in the same department so that you can address questions across all areas before adding in more users in the next wave of implementation.
I did not make the decision to select EmpCenter and only know our university also considered Kronos although I assume there were other products considered. My use of Kronos was only at an employee level and I am not sure how it all stacks up for sure. What I do think is that EmpCenter is more customizable than other products and was seen to be able to adapt to fit all of our needs so it was a system that could be used by everyone. I think it is good we have one time keeping system and don't have some employees using paper or a different system because the one could not meet our needs, but as I said this also makes it more difficult to network with other users and to get improvements made quickly.
Tenrox as a system is one of my favorites, if not my favorite. I really like the system-structure and its capabilities. Previously, the only negative mark I gave Tenrox was customer service and as stated that has shown great improvement in the past months. Conversely, our other primary system (Advantage) has always provided us with excellent customer service as one of their strongest points, which made it even more frustrating to have those issues with Tenrox support. I did not select Tenrox myself, but if I were shopping around now, I would be very very likely to decide on Tenrox. I would recommend it, so long as the system fits the needs of your business and staff
Tenrox has caused headaches across offices and the frustrations with reporting is huge. It's been great to have a starting point to track hours and try to see what is billable and non-billable, but after this was implemented across our company where are seeing the negative ROI as its been so difficult to pull these reports accurately across teams, individuals, and clients!
