Paychex Flex gives me peace of mind

Overall, I have been very pleased with Paychex as a company and their online platform, Paychex Flex.  I have the peace of mind that our payroll is in capable hands. 

Pros

It is easy to use and it gives me a peace of mind that our company's payroll is in capable hands. Their customer service is great. Each customer has a dedicated payroll specialist, so every time I have a question I am talking to the same person. Our payroll specialist has always been very helpful any time I have had weird situations or questions.

Paychex withholds all the appropriate taxes for both the employee and employer and then files them when the appropriate government entities. Our business is located Ohio, which has a complex tax structure including both state and local taxes. Paychex has saved me so much time and stress.

Cons

I wish that Paychex Flex tracked pay increases. That is the only thing that I liked better about our previous payroll provider. Our previous payroll provider had a tab that showed an employee's salary history and the date of each raise. Paychex Flex does not have this, so I have to track it separately.

I wish they had a more intuitive reporting function. The standard payroll reports are laid out very well and are very easy to run, but if I need to run a report that it out of the ordinary, I usually end up calling my payroll specialist because I can't find the report. To be fair, the couple of times this has happened I have been looking for a report having to do with workers comp and since workers comp is run by a government entity in Ohio it has some added complexities.

Paychex has FINALLY gotten it right

Payroll reports for my clients are at my fingertips!

Pros

Paychex FLEX is easy to navigate, fast at loading reports and pages, and gives you access to what you need. As an accountant it is vital for me to be able to have access to the reports and items I need to get accounting and taxes done without having to jump through hoops to get that information. Many payroll firms make this task frustrating and time consuming. With Paychex FLEX I have one log in for all of my clients and can easily navigate to the company and reports that I need every month or at year-end within a few minutes (including the login process).

Cons

One thing I don't like is that the default view for reports is set to the last 90 days. Many times, especially dealing with tax forms, I need reports that were created more than 90 days ago. Also, since the newest reports go to the top of the list you already have the most recent reports at the top. Why not default to the past year and then just let me filter down to a smaller group of reports if that's what I want?

Other than that small gripe, they have done a lot to improve their FLEX format. When it was first released everyone hated it but it has finally been improved to the point that it is extremely usable. The problem is that it seems like every time they get things just right they move to a new platform and "upgrade" their systems. I understand that this might be a necessary evil but it sure does cause a lot of growing pains for the end-user.

Paychex Flex the next best electronic payroll system!

The benefits of using Paychex Flex software is that the product is available online to users. Other benefits include being able to select a specific payment plan or subscription suitable for the company to aid the human resources aspects of payroll. Additional benefits include accessing a dashboard with all employee information to be edited or submitted at once. More benefits of utilizing Paychex Flex include developing quick reports such as payroll statistics. Paychex Flex is a good tool to administer payroll for your company.

Pros

Paychex Flex is an online software that human resources personnel can utilize for payroll. Paychex Flex has various subscriptions that company's can select depending on the types of features. Paychex Flex offers an employee dashboard that requires an username, password, and pin number. Paychex Flex allows users to disburse amounts of funds to contractors, employees, vendors, and sponsors. Paychex Flex offers tools, tutorials, and customer support related to the online library and overall application.

Cons

Paychex Flex requires a new verification code upon logging into the dashboard. Users listed in the Paychex Flex may not be deleted depending on administrative rights to complete such an action. Paychex Flex may provide usernames and passwords to administrators and not employees, thus employees may not be able to update time card electronically. Paychex Flex allows time card adjustments to be made by the administrator. Paychex Flex allows payroll adjustments to be made by the administrator.

Paychex Flex is a robust payroll solution that can accommodate almost any payroll need.

Pros

Together with the company's team of payroll specialists, Paychex Flex is an effective payroll solution for small and large companies alike. As administrator for a small company, I appreciate having permissions to manage my company's staff in the tool while allowing the payroll specialist from Paychex to key in the biweekly payroll data. This delegation of duties gives me control over the the job functions that are most important to me.

The General Ledger integration with QuickBooks Online is configurable and works well once set up to meet your business needs. The 3rd party integrator's staff is professional and diaplays an expert knowledge of both Paychex Flex and Quickbooks.

What I like most about Paychex Flex is that our tax returns and payments at the Federal level and for most states are done for us automatically.

Cons

The browser interface is unattractive and not always self explanatory. The client id, which is needed on all email correspondence with your payroll specialist and is displayed on the banner at the top of the screen, cannot be copied and pasted into emails.

The filter feature on the Person screen doesn't work consistently, and I frequently have to reapply the same filter so that only active staff appear.

Online help for the software can be misleading or inaccurate. After following instructions for 1) giving access to staff and 2) adding a new state for withholdings, without success, I learned from my payroll specialist that I didn't have the ability to perform either task through the software.

Love the Ease if Online Benefit Administration

Survey software is not something that I usually recommend.

Pros

The best thing about this software is that I can do everything I need to do on my computer or mobile phone at any time of the day or night. The application is very easy to access and I administer payroll, 401k, health, dental and vision benefits, FSA and employee additions/changes over the application. Almost every service I utilize through Paychex is on this application. Invaluable! If I'm out of town I can still submit payroll! WOW! What a game changer Paychex Flex has been! The old way of doing business is out the window with Paychex Flex replacing it in a very positive way!

Cons

There is a couple of items that I would like to see enhanced. In people, I would like the ability to always pull up my preferred view of employees without having to click on the apply button. My preferred view is saved but will not display until I click on apply. Second, on the people drop down menu from the upper right corner, I would like the ability to select that view as well. When that drop down is selected I get all the employees that have ever been entered into the Paychex database - terminated and active. I want to be able to display just the active employees in that drop down. These are just enhancement requests that in no way affect the valuable pros of the application. The items in the cons are just "nice to haves".

A great asset to have when running and business.

Pros

The software itself allows me to eliminate the need for a time clock for my employees. They are able to have the app installed on their company issued smartphones and log in with their fingerprint access on the phone (which the app supports) and can clock into work in no time. They also have the availability to request time off, check vacation, sick and personal balances, view pay stubs and a ton of other features geared toward self help for the employee. This software saves me money so that I do not have to pay someone to sit and calculate all of the different times and payroll sheets. I would be lost without Paychex Flex.

Cons

The app can be a little slow at times. They also schedule down time on the overnight hours until 530am when most of our work does begin before that. It is a simple fix as I can enter staffs time manually when needed. You also need to trust your employees to punch in and out when they actually show up to a job site and not while driving home.

Excellent company top to bottom

Pros

Paychex has been top-notch for over five years, when I switched to them from another payroll company. I operate a small seasonal business with about 10 employees, and from the beginning I have received all the support that I need for my payroll and tax responsibilities, and at a more reasonable rate than I was paying before. I deal with one single payroll specialist every week (unless she is on vacation or something), which I love, and if she is unavailable the fill-in specialists have been able to take care of my payroll, which is not quite standard, without any issues. The website took a little getting used to initially, but I download my reports from there every week, quarter, and year, and everything is easy to find and use. I couldn't recommend Paychex more highly, at least for any business such as mine.

Cons

If anything, I feel that it would be good to consider a website review and edit - I do not have anything specific to offer in terms of what to change, but it did seem a little confusing the first few times using it. I don't have any issues now, but admittedly I only log on to do the same thing (download the report) each week, quarter, and year.

I have worked with Paychex for HR and Payroll purposes.

We were able to reduce storage of paper statements that were never picked up. We were able to increase employee morale by giving our employees the ability to see their own data and make time off requests on their own.

Pros

The user friendly approach within the Employee Online Access. We had employees that were afraid to go paperless with pay statements but with a little training everyone began utilizing the system. I liked the time and attendance module which allowed employees to see their own timesheets and administratiors to make corrections/update their staff timesheets and approve prior to payroll processing.

Cons

I disliked the fact that the payroll module didn't link directly with time and attendance, we had thought that what was done in time and attendance regarding time off balances would automatically feed to payroll and reflect on our employees pay statements. But we found out that we had to do adjustments in both windows to ensure it matched.

Don't bite off more than you can chew

We transferred over from Preview to Flex in March and have had some sort of issue (always a new problem) with running payroll from glitches, to inaccuracies in accruals due to incomplete data transfers to random errors like pay rates suddenly not being mapped to the proper pay components. Overall Paychex has great features and I love that our employees are offered the option to view their stubs and w-2s online and request time off but, I feel like they need to train their employees more on their updates and work out the kinks before they release updates because it causes a lot of unexpected error on the user end which cause a delay and inconvenisnce on our end.

Pros

I like that their Flex software is "live" and you no longer need to transmit hours as a file.

Cons

New features are released with glitches, representatives are NEVER available, it takes a lot of follow-up to get assistance and they pass you from representative to representative like a "hot potato".

Good Website

Pros

I do like how the website is laid out and how easy it is to run reports, set up new employees, and enter in payroll. In general the reps are helpful and you dont always have to talk to just your assigned rep to get answers.

Cons

When there is a tax problem, the only person you can talk to is your rep, who general doesn't know anything about taxes and can only pass the question onto the tax department. Once you ask the question, it can a few weeks before you even hear back from someone about the status of your questions. It gets put into a queue and you are not told if or when it will get answered. This is very frustrating when it comes to time sensitive tax issues.