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 8.3 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
Paylocity
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
APS
Paylocity
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
The Payroll solution is offered as a standalone service, but additional solutions must be used in conjunction with the Payroll solution.
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
APS Payroll is an easy to use payroll system, and integrates well with some things such as the APS Hire feature, which handles onboarding, and the eSelfServe timeclock feature. It exports well to Quickbooks, but is only ok with NetSuite. (It works but is a completely manual process and takes a lot of setup.) Our tax registration and filing has been fine and we're always apprised of any tax discrepancies such as small Unemployment overages/underages when filed compared to what was withheld.
Paylocity appears to be well-suited for startups to large businesses. As with any product, finding the right price point for the services provided is the challenge. Always remember that one small company that would really appreciate the "benefits essentials" or some other part of the platform but can't afford them right now, may be the ones to get you that large company through word of mouth...IF they had been able to experience that part of the product and refer it to others.
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.
Payroll is made pretty easy. I love that we have the ability to log into payroll, we just upload the information from commissions, things like that where there are exceptions to a regular payroll run. It may make it very easy to do that, just a quick upload. Additionally, when we're in the payroll grid, it gives us the ability to just make quick changes to people's pay or their tax schedule, tax withholdings, things like that without having to go through a lot of different screens. It's just very easy to access just for the click of a button. Love that.
We talked about performance reviews, talked about payroll with benefits administration, it allows us to utilize EDI feeds with our benefit vendors so it creates a seamless, but we just enter the information into Paylocity and then it seamlessly provides that information to our vendors. That's been really helpful. And adjusting benefits is also very easy within Paylocity. I love the recent edition of compensation analysis information, so I'm able to go into the compensation module and look for jobs that are similar to a job title at our company. I can enter the job description, I give them what state that the person or the job is in, and it pops out compensation data. It gives me different options, so titles that might be similar. So if there's not something that's an exact fit, I'm able to find something really, really close. It's been a huge upgrade because before that I was having to use a different vendor and paying $400 per job and now it's significantly less expensive to Paylocity and I'm still getting great quality data. It's been very helpful.
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.
We have had lots of year end issues specifically with Partners W2's.
We had an accrual issue that was causing 2 additional vacation/sick accruals per year.
When updating accruals- the paperwork to do so is confusing at times. I feel there is little support to assist you in filling the paperwork correctly to reflect what you need the accrual to actually do.
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.
There are several technical issues we have experienced this past year with the employee onboarding process that we are still waiting to have resolved. Overall our experience with Paylocity has been positive, and we love how user-friendly and easy to navigate the system is. It has made all of our HR processes much more streamlined and efficient.
The APS Payroll software is very easy to use, and it is easy to train new employees on it. The APS Payroll support team is very helpful and response time is quick. It is easy to enter/change employee information, adjust salaries and benefits, etc. New features have also been added that makes it even better, such as being able to set up your own income/deduction items.
I would give it that overall rating because we implemented in 2023 and so although that may feel like a lot of time, it still is, we still have a lot to learn and so I'm optimistic that as we learn more that rating will increase.
Over the last 3 years, we've only had one major service issue that rendered Airbase unusable for us for about 24 hours. That said, they navigated the SVB bank crisis very well and made sure funds were available during that time.
We had some minor hiccups throughout the year but they have all been fixable. Paylocity integrates well with our 401k provider, Principal, and our benefits, OneDigital. It makes it simple to house everything and have it all connected. It doesn't slow anything down to have Principal integrated. It makes it more efficient
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
It is very hard to get answers to your questions, you cannot speak to someone without days of requesting assistance or answers and then eventually can get a call back and then it is usually resolved fairly quickly. But NOT easy to get that help.
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.
Implementation was a bit bumpy and Paylocity team not always available for next steps and/or questions. I feel like Paylocity could have done a better job in their fact finding as far as what we were currently doing, our payroll policies and needs, etc. so that we would have run into less issues as we moved forward.
We had used ADP for years and had always struggled with their customer service. With over 20 locations (20+ W2s, quarterly filings, etc) we had a lot of questions. We would have to call and sit on hold for long periods of time to talk to someone who couldn't always answer our questions. Then we would get different answers from different people or have to re-explain our issue. It was a major time suck for my employees and they dreaded having to call all of the time. For us - the final straws for us to switch providers were: +Numerous year end filings with incorrect names and addresses (they couldn't keep our 20+ locations separate even though our paperwork was completed correctly) +Incorrect SUI rates for several locations that resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in overpayments which was a lot of money for small hotels. We had sent in numerous requests for them to fix this but it never happened +Lack of care - even though we were having all of these issues, nobody would work with us to get them all resolved and make sure to remedy the situation. We had to seek out a manager to get them resolved but even after this, we still had more issues. Overall - DON'T stick with ADP or even think about switching to them. They might be able to slash prices but their poor customer service and lack of care will cost you in the end. It's not worth it. APS does everything ADP had the capability of but we don't have the errors or headaches we did before. I am really looking forward to this year end!
We went through demos five years ago and we evaluated ADP and UKG in the past, and we used Paycor previously. In the past, I've used ADP and Kronos when it was still Kronos at other companies. So several different ones. One of the main reasons was that it was all one platform and you didn't have to log into other platforms for it to communicate with each other. Payroll talks to time that talks back to payroll and you don't have to log into anything separate. The reporting was also really easy and you didn't have to have a master's degree to do it.
We have gone from a medium sized company to a larger company with no issues whatsoever with Paylocity being able to keep up or do what we need it to do for the size of our needs. In fact, it does more than we even use at this juncture
They are thorough, care about quality and success, take the time needed to implement properly, answer questions, build data feeds. A professional, caring, very skilled team there.
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.
So when I first found Paylocity back in 2013 and was pitching it to the senior leadership company, my PowerPoint presentation, our return on investment was reducing errors in time and labor. We did paper time sheets back in the day back in 2007, 2008. So we were always running paper time sheets, Microsoft Excel or other standalone products, printing them out and hand keying them into a payroll system. So my ROI to our company was to save money and time on data entry and also to better manage the taxes. So we pay for the tax service, we're in 27 states having to manage that. Previously we were responsible for knowing what every state tax codes were, what every state tax compliance rules were. So with Paylocity we signed up for a tax service and that has been a huge return on investment.
