Epicor HCM (discontinued) vs. Gusto

I could not recommend this system to anyone. If you do decide to go with this system, depending on organization size, you'll need at least one dedicated IT person with SQL/Report-builder experience to manage the system and reporting, as well as another full-time HR member to manage other administrative set-up and deal with the many, many, user support issues that will crop up. I'm shocked at the number of positive reviews for this product. A couple of them reiterate the same thing such as each of use (which is completely untrue) and many fields/tables for data storage, which leads me to believe that they're from Epicor or Epicor consultants

Gusto is a great fit for small teams and startups that want a simple, reliable way to run payroll, manage tax filings, and give CPAs access without constant micromanagement. It’s especially useful for founders who need something that “just works.” The human support has been excellent—especially when forwarding confusing IRS mail.
That said, it’s a bit less intuitive when it comes to benefits and compliance for fully remote companies. For example, labor law poster distribution isn’t streamlined for digital teams, and setting up benefits felt more complex than it needed to be. Still, I’d recommend Gusto to any startup looking to get payroll right from day one.

Incentivized

• Timesheets show everything that time has been charged to in a quick glance. There is a lot of information displayed onscreen and is very easy to decipher.
• Employees charge their time on a well-designed front end program, and data is gleaned from that and dispersed into the various timekeeping and expense tracking modules.
• The abilities to charge time to direct, indirect and downtime are all valuable- see where time is being spent and use it as a coaching tool.

Incentivized

• Gusto makes onboarding employees and ensuring their documents are signed very easy.
• The way you can integrate things like Google Workspace makes both onboarding new employees into the apps you use a breeze, as well as when you need to offboard them.
• Managing benefits is simple, because they take care of all the heavy lifting. I just have to review the options, make a selection, and they take it from there.

Incentivized

• Compliance is one area that needs further attention. For example in candidate self-service, the admin and managers can see the candidate's demographic information as part of their application, which shouldn't happen. If an internal candidate applies for a job, the hiring manager automatically gets access to that employee's record just like their regular manager.
• On the timesheets module, there are issues with CA specific OT calculation rules on a bi-weekly payroll, where it does not calculate OT for time worked in excess of 5 consecutive days. Also, the application has random (but rare) occurrences where it resets the time zone to the server time zone for users that clock-in/ out.
• Customizations that require professional services contracts can be somewhat difficult in terms of getting resources assigned. When upgrading the system to a new version, the admin has to conduct its own testing, including all and any customizations made to the system and then work with Epicor on resolving any issues.
• Customer Support structure could be better. Currently there is no official filtering of issues and expected response time for different kinds of issues, except for system access. When offering payroll and time keeping, the customer support should reflect reduced time for resolution of issues in these time sensitive areas.
• User training. Epicor HCM offers no free training, aside from webinars on new version releases. While they do offer training sessions, users have to pay for it. From a customer perspective this is difficult to accept. You pay to purchase the system/ module, but if you want to learn how to use it, you have to pay again.

• Adding in previous time manually could be more accessible.
• Notifications for when employees manually change hours.
• We should allow 1099 users to use the mobile app instead of restricting them to the website, especially since they can just log into the full website on their mobile device.

Incentivized

I just recently lost my job after 16 years, and purposely sought out a position where I could continue to work with HCM. I am now in a similar role to what I was in before, and can continue the same type of work and enhancements that I did at my other company.

Unless they break it, I'm never leaving. It's just too easy. Gusto is also really affordable, and for what I pay, it's worth having the historical record within the system. I like that I can go back and pull up W2's for year's past. This sort of easy access reporting, has been helpful especially when getting reports for PPP loans.

Where it's good: Epicor HCM at a high level has a straight-forward interface for navigating to the main content sections at either the employee or HR administrator level. The interfaces are consistent throughout the application, and after a brief learning curve, one can navigate through the remainder of the interface pages in any content area without too much difficulty. HCM also has great tools for making sure the analysis of data is available and accessible to non-programmer personnel. Where it struggles: One thing working against the usability of the HCM product is the overuse of the row-selection scheme for all many to many relationships. HCM uses a "select the row from the left frame" and then "enter data corresponding to this row in the right frame" scheme for most of its data entry components. One example of overuse is the employee address entry. During the first setup of an employee or during a candidate's application, HCM allows the user to specify multiple addresses. While this functionality is desired for long-term storage, an option doesn't exist to forgo this interface type for quick initial entry for the primary use case (one address per employee). This is one example, but is particularly visible when a candidate must also bridge the learning curve.

Incentivized

The overall platform and its speed of response are amazing. I would recommend this to any other business owner for ease of use and reliability. Email reminders are great if I’m super busy and have forgotten a few tasks. The price point compared to local payroll service is hands down a huge win.

Incentivized

The product was always available.

The product performs well. As with any software there are bugs and system enhancements needed, but there are channels in place to let Epicor know what they are so they can add to future versions. Open Enrollment and Salary Planning can be a bit slow at times.

The customer support is terrible. When we open cases, it takes weeks to get the development team to have the first look at the case. If development is required, their team commits on a delivery date and up to now—those dates were never respected. They don't do any follow up. Customer service is very bad. When we request an update on the development progress, nobody answers!

Incentivized

Gusto's customer service has really deteriorated lately and they seem to have really changed their focus. It used to be when you called you were routed to an individual who knew about payroll, benefits, reporting, etc. but now you get someone who seems to have not received the correct training. My last call about a dismissal payroll took me over an hour of my time and the person still could not help me and finally transferred me to someone else.

Incentivized

We had someone from Epicor come on site to do training, and we "shared" our trainer with another company who was also doing the same major upgrade. It was nice to have another company there so we could ask each other (and the trainer) questions. This allowed for more meaningful discussions during training.

As stated earlier, you won't find all of the problems and things that you would like to improve on until you implement. After go-live, you then will have a long period of adjustment as you get the data and processes to work the way that you really want them to.

Incentivized

Reach out to support immediately if you are having trouble setting up Gusto. Rather than being confused and trying to figure it out yourself, it's much better to talk to someone who knows what they are doing. Save yourself time and frustration and reach out to support

Incentivized

After a failed implementation with Open4, we needed a solution that was more usable with our end-users. The outdated system provided by one of ADP's products needed to be replaced. We chose Epicor HCM because we were enticed by the functionality it provided and ease of use, as well as its ability to be integrated with Epicor ERP, a product which we had owned and used for several years.

Incentivized

It's been a while since I used QuickBooks for payroll, but it doesn't even come close to it. Gusto is infinitely easier, allowing for employee time tracking, handling calculations and payments of payroll and payroll taxes, managing regulatory compliance in the background, and more. I had a lot of moments using QuickBooks Payroll where I thought, "Am I even doing this right?" — it felt like you had to have additional knowledge of HR regulations in your state to do everything correctly. Gusto has it ALL handled so you can focus your time on higher-impact tasks in your business.

Incentivized

Performance is not noticeably impacted by adding more users. Microsoft IIS and SQL are Epicor HCM's underlying technology and have proven reliability. In addition, IS staff are easy to find that know these technologies.

• Report deadlines must always be extended as my organization's HR team must manually comb through the data for inaccuracies.
• Reports generated lack integrity. For example, I sent a report to a large donor and the report eliminated nearly 100 employees unbeknownst to my department.
• My organization is still waiting to see the ROI on Epicor. It hasn't been able to meet our basic needs.

Incentivized

• I am not involved enough to know well, but I would say that Gusto has saved me about 1-2 hours in my onboarding process with my new company compared to my past experiences trying to onboard with ADP. I have also finished the process and am not frustrated like usual.

Incentivized