Why ADP PayForce sucks - again! | Go Back
I received a lot of emails from other companies thinking about PayForce after I wrote this humble opinion. Since questions were mostly around specific issues, I decided to elaborate more on this topic and provide some facts. So, here is what I came up with…
ADP will try to sell PayForce to you because:
- “PayForce is a web-based hosted solution and this is the future of all applications”. Bullsh*t! Don’t ever believe that web-based hosted solutions are the future. Maybe for small companies and mom-and-pop shops it is, but that’s about it. Always have your data available, sitting right next to you, especially if you want to interface it with another application or create custom reports via external tools.
- “PayForce’s availability is 99+%”. Yeah right. If I counted the number of times PayForce was down, you would be surprised. We’ve had occurences when PayForce services were down on the day of payroll!
- “PayForce is robust and access time is very fast”. Another sales pitch and more BS. It is slow as hell because PayForce databases are on a “shared” hosting. This means your database resides together with a lot of other companies. How slow is it you might ask? I’ve had cases when a single transaction took more than 10 minutes to execute.
- “You can access your data at any time through our advanced database tools”. The “advanced database tools” ADP provides is a web-based Crystal front-end (called ePortfolio) with stripped out functionality. You can only export your data to Excel (no CSV support) and you know what happens to Excel when you have more than 65 thousand rows… Oh yeah, if the query pulls more than 150 rows, expect Crystal to time out and die. And the Crystal front-end is even slower than PayForce.
- “You own your data and we can provide it to you at any time”. When we were ready to finally say goodbye to PayForce, our account rep told us that we needed to extract everything through Crystal. Come again?! Extract data from 1000 tables via custom SQL queries? You gotta be kidding me! All I’m asking for is a database dump. Any SQL database can do it. No, I do not need your PLSQL code - all I care about is my data. Guess what - ADP will not give you a database dump. This means that you have to handpick the data you need and extract it one by one. And expect ADP to delete your database once you part ways. They don’t have a “luxury” of keeping unnecessary data. What a joke! Of course they offered to write custom queries in Crystal and extract everything we need, but at a not-so-affordable price. Basically, all data extracts would be treated as custom queries and ADP typically charges several thousand dollars per query. I had to fight my way through and requested to talk to their DB admin group. ADP ended up connecting me to someone who works at the data center and the lady told me a data dump is not impossible. LOL! So much for owning your data. Another option was to access your data “read-only” for a monthly fee. No, thanks!
- “PayForce has excellent support and you can get help at any time in less than a minute”. Hahahaha! Called and left a voicemail. Waited for several hours. Called again and left a voicemail. Wrote an email. Wrote another email next day and copied the sales rep. No response from both. Called again on the third day and left an angry voicemail. Someone calls back and identifies the issue as “level 2″ and promises to call back within a few minutes. Another day passes, no calls no emails. Call the account rep and he is clueless - apparently he never got the email. Yeah right.
- “PayForce has excellent reporting”. Pretty much all of the reports we have today had to be custom-built because PayForce doesn’t have them. Did I mention that they charge for each one separately? And it’s not cheap either.
- “Our payroll services are outstanding and very accurate”. Hmm…everything from incorrect state/local taxes all the way to payroll services sending checks to wrong locations. And ADP will not take any legal/financial responsibility when they screw up. When they screw up - it’s your fault, end of story.
- “PayForce is very user-friendly and you can access your data directly through the front-end”. PayForce has the most ridiculous infrastructure. Apparently the data on the front-end is not 100% accurate - the accurate data resides on their “mainframe”. What a heck? User-friendly? Give me a break!
- “PayForce runs on industry-standard Java, which is robust and efficient”. Do you know what a memory leak is? It’s OK for PayForce to eat up to 512 MB of RAM and crash IE. You simply ignore those and add more memory. And by the way, ADP loves rolling out new versions of Java (forced install), so it’s OK when you see 5 different versions of Java installed on a client’s machine.
- “Administering users and groups in PayForce is very easy”. Ask our Director of HR and I’m sure she would love to share the pain. Oh yeah, I forgot about system upgrades when you have to go back and redo the security for all users. This one cracks me up - you must provide BOTH login and password in caps (uppercase). Long live caps lock!
- “Data is consistent and accurate throughout the database”. Love this one. It’s OK for one person to share the same ID with another. It’s OK that vital data is missing - ADP just works.
There is a lot more to this, but I’m not going to waste more time writing about PayForce. I’m glad we are moving away from this piece of crap software.
If ADP is trying to sell PayForce to your company - run while you can!
P.S. Typing “payforce review”, “adp payforce review” and “adp is evil” in google returns my page as the first result :)
March 27th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Called in payroll correctly on 03/18/08
payroll came in 03/19/08
checks and DD(direct Deposit) stubs were distributed to employees.
report came to accounting
accounting notices the dates are wrong. dollar amounts are correct just check date 3/25 rather than 3/20.
called Fernando with ADP
First he was rude and wanted to take the time to tell me it was all my fault. After I told him to fix it, he did the following.
he said the DD would need to be hand written by us, and he would credit back to us that amount ($5960.60)
the actual checks (not DD) were already in the hands of the employees and some already deposited into their banks
so we could not get them back from the employees, he said we should only need to deal with the DD.
3/27 I noticed that ADP credited the entire payroll back to our account.($12,509.79) This might mean that the ADP checks that the employees deposited into their accounts are not going to clear.
Called ADP with this problem and they said ……
They can and will re-instate the checks but it takes 72 hours to get this done. this might mean some checks will be returned. this is very frustrating!!
I am not sure what to do…. MIGHT??
They did re-instate it and they show no checks being cashed so far so we MIGHT have caught it in time. This is just a warning because I don’t trust them.
Please ask or explain this to the employees listed above. They most likely will not have any problems but please ask them to call their banks and be sure.
If the check was returned then ADP will give them any charges for the return and any other charges that happened because of this problem.
If the checks were returned we will need to write hand check out of our account to replace them and then get a refund from ADP.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Hi Nasim,
Im fairly new to this, and i know your comments about payforce is probably true. I just finished school, but they never of course taught us this program for accounting, but do you know how i can learn the program without the bs of ADP. Thanks in advance Nasim..
-Sarah
saromh@gmail.com
July 14th, 2008 at 7:25 am
And god help you if you’re an eTime end user - I am unlucky enough to have been set up to use this at my company. When I get in in the morning, my machine takes a long-ish but reasonable 4 minutes to boot up. Fine. But then I fire up firefox and try to load etime, and the goddamn thing takes 10 minutes to load. That is absolutely unacceptable. The entire thing is build in Java and is buggy as hell. After taking the 10 minutes, the program will crash firefox, and will only work again after restarting the browser. I lose about $5 every day just waiting for this thing to get off its ass and go. That’s 30 dollars per week, just because some idiot at ADP decided to run authentication in a java applet that takes up 26 MEGABYTES of ram just to load up. Multiply these losses, and the many tax mistakes I expect they’re making, by the hourly workers of a whole company, and you’re looking at millions of dollars.
This company should be sued for making such a piss poor product.
August 31st, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Hey guys, you should look into dealing with a small business payroll company. Check out http://www.PayrollAccountantLive.com. Let me know what you think!
October 26th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Or just call Paychex
October 29th, 2008 at 7:22 am
I’m trying to identify what the various Payforce access codes are - F, V, C, A, etc. Can you provide any insight or direction as to where I can find this information?
November 14th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Right from the first sales meeting the rep said that we could get a master employee file download automatically through a FTP feature. During implimentation no one new what i was talking about and the sale rep appoligized for the misunderstanding. Basically lied to get us upgraded from the in house PC Payroll. Basically everything i’ve read on this site is true. I’m surprised i still get a check every two week.