PDS Vista vs. Sage HRMS

You have the option of taking the system in house or being a hosted client. Figure out what resources your IT department has to spare, if you will have a dedicated administrator who will do all the upgrades and enhancements or if you will be job sharing those responsibilities. Like all software, Vista HRMS has multiple upgrades a year. You will need someone or a team of a few individuals to test these upgrades out and be able to take on a role of administrator, technology consultant or front end user and make sure these upgrades are working from all angles. Vista HRMS really is a good product for keeping all HR and Payroll related records in one system, I just stress the fact that you have to have someone on hand who wants to own the product and be willing to learn as much as possible. The more you put into this product, the more you will get out of it

Sage HRMS might be great for a smaller company under 1,000 employees. I would not recommend it for larger companies. It becomes too burdensome because many processes still have to be manual and reports take forever to process if you have too many records in your system

Incentivized

• Vista HRMS is very flexible, it does everything we need for HR, benefits and payroll. It’s user-friendly and intuitive to use, when we roll out new self-service items our employees have no problems and require minimal training or documentation.
• PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are usually addressed within a few days. We were upgrading our production servers to Windows 2012 over a weekend and a key person in our organization was on leave. When we checked with PDS to see what cost would be involved if we needed their help, they said it was included in our regular maintenance, no extra cost.
• The PDS User’s Conference is an excellent learning opportunity for training on everything Vista does, including using Crystal Reports for custom reporting. You also get to meet and talk to the executive and development staff and have direct input into the future product development.

• Reporting - there are three levels of reporting - 1. Standard Reports 2. Query Tool - users can create very simple list with some filtering functionality 3. Crystal Reports - user can create very simple to complex report pulling data from multiple table, calculated fields, etc.
• Benefit Tracking - benefit plans are setup utilizing rate tables therefore rate changes are updated globally
• Payroll - everyday payroll processing and tax filing that is very user friendly

Incentivized

• Job History - Too many areas that dates populate.
• ATS - There is a lack of flexibility for applicants when applying for multiple jobs.
• Searching - The functionality is a little limited, would be nice to type in any information on a person and search.

Incentivized

• It is sometimes hard to identify parts of competency/compensation history. We built tables to store this data but it is not laid out well on the screen.
• Sometimes, even when you tell the system to "Add to History" it doesn't update so there is history missing. This impacts someone that relies on history for troubleshooting and reports.

Incentivized

It's working well for us. Yes, we do have some challenges, but we're working through them. With all the time and money put in to this, why would we switch. Especially since we really haven't used this product to it's full potential, but that's many due to time challenges.

I do not work with this software anymore, and I am not involved with the renewal of it. However, if I were, I would still suggest using it unless something better was introduced

Incentivized

In my line of work, PDS Vista doesn't fit. I recruit and manager talent pipelines, as well as all onboarding aspects of 11 companies. I spend more hours getting data configured and searching for information within this software than I spend with my candidates. Theres an abundance duplication, and there isn't a single stream of information shared across screens. I have to input the SAME details into several screens for them to match up. Nothing is intuitive, and its certainly not end user friendly

Incentivized

PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the
majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we
call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are
usually addressed within a few days

The resources and online tools that PDS provide are extremely thorough and helpful in our training and learning.

Ask lots of questions, ensure you fully understand the functionality (particularly history records) and train, train, train the users for correct and complete utilization of the system.

We had multiple vendors come and demo their products/systems for us. Each one had great features but at the end of the day, based on what the Vista HRMS system had to offer and how we were able to personalize the system to meet our needs we felt the choice was simple and we havent looked back since.

Sage HRMS is popular and it's used in most organizations due to the reputation of Sage in coming up with popular and reliable business softwares. The software is not that expensive and after learning how to use it, everything becomes smooth and perfect. It's ultimate strength lies in payroll management and helping in applicant tracking capabilities

Incentivized

• Vista HRMS offers a very reasonably priced solution that performs the functions we need for our business.
• With a very small IT staff we successfully implemented all modules of Vista HRMS in approx. 6 months from start of implementation. Compared to other projects the cost to implement this system was very cost effective.
• We have been able to maintain our internal benefits, payroll & HR functions in-house with no additional staff at a significantly reduced annual maintenance cost.

• Sage HRMS allowed us to manage payroll in house.
• It was disappointing that we had to use an outside vendor to file and pay our withholding tax.
• Ultimately, the decision was made to outsource payroll after using HRMS for 3 years.

Incentivized