Comment by tarr11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tarr11 | Hacker News Reader

Sachs is right that the SMB market is very cost sensitive.

We use both Zenefits and Gusto (mainly because of legacy issues - neither offered both benefits + payroll when we started)

Zenefits manages our health insurance and onboarding, and Gusto does payroll. We don't pay Zenefits directly. With this layoff, there's about zero chance I would consider switching to their payroll service (even though it's about 20% cheaper than Gusto)

Gusto has a really solid UI. However, their problems are that unlike ADP, they require a long lead time (5 days I think?) for payroll. They also don't differentiate between part time and full time staff which makes this prohibitive if you use a lot of part time staff with few hours. Neither service provides a "full stop" HR solution - we have to use WhenIWork for timesheets and scheduling, and Workable for an ATS. I could justify their pricing if this was all rolled in.

Gusto recently doubled their prices so we are looking at OnPay which is about 1/3rd the price of either Gusto or Zenefits for payroll.

As an employee paid via Gusto, they beat the hell out of ADP.

My favorite bit about ADP, at least as used by my large-ish acquirer, is how they go out of your way to prevent your browser from being able to remember your user + pass. My second favorite is how those morons have a vacation scheduler, and if you put in two dates, my default it includes weekends. eg request vacation mid week 1 to mid week 2, and you have to read carefully or it takes 7 days of vacation from your vacation account. For salaried employees, that they know are salaried because they do my payroll.

I've used ADP for years and I have never successfully logged in without resetting my password, even when my password is correct because it is saved in my password manager or written down. I don't log in that often, so I'd like to think they are periodically resetting passwords for "security". But I don't think that is what's happening. :(

It's because their ridiculous password age restrictions are shorter than the frequency with which the average person logs in. I, too, have had to change my password every time I login, for YEARS. And if you get it wrong 3 times, you get locked out and have to wait for HR to unlock.

And, pre-workforcenow, you had to click a little up arrow 8 times to add 8 hours to your PTO on Monday. Then you move on to tuesday. Then Wednesday.....

When ADP locked me out, I found that just restarting my browser or using a private browsing window would usually work. Their "lock out" seemed to be saved in some temporary session state.

Gusto got their lead time down a year or two ago. Now you can run payroll by 4PM Wednesday and it will go out on Friday.

The price increase is annoying, but they also added a lot of features, so it didn't seem unreasonable. Agree it would be great if they added in time tracking.

Gusto makes me so happy. The feeling of a dozen nasty government tax forms being filled out in a couple clicks is sublime.

From my perspective, it's an absurdly good deal for the money. Not sure if this context matters, but there were only 2-3 of us (angel-funded) and our needs were simple. We don't use them anymore because we were acquired, but I'm still full of love for 'em.

Shoot me an email -- I can see if we can get you on our 2-Day ACH program for running payroll

Thanks, just sent you an email.

BTW, we also do health insurance and on-boarding, and there lot's of benefits to it being under the same roof as payroll. Feel free to reach out if you're interested in moving those over to Gusto!

I'd be interested in this too. How do I contact you?

Contact info is in my profile. Thanks, looking forward to hearing from you!

Why not Workday?

It's $$$$$

heh, Workday is big boy status and convoluted go thru a 3rd-party to acquire the software method.

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