Paychex Flex reviews

The customer service makes the product easy to use. The support makes the product as with many payroll software products it will do what you want you just have to find the right entry and set up.

At times its so complete it can be overwhelming to find some less used features you had found before. Again they are all like this but the customer support makes this a breeze as you can actually talk to a human being that listens and helps.

Our organization welcomes a number of seasonal international staff on J-1 visas. Paychex Flex makes it much easier to consolidate all of their pay-related information into one easy to access place.

There are few cons to using this software for us as an organization. Occasionally, the acquisition of social security numbers can take a while for those international staff, but Paychex Flex is always very patient with the timing.

One login for my admin/personal use was the one good feature.

Where do I begin? The HR, Payroll, Time and Labor/Attendance, GL, Reporting, Onboarding (with MyStaffingPro) were all horrible. The worst experience in my many years of HR/Payroll.

I like the ease and very user friendly interface of the product. I am an administrator and this product has been very helpful for me.

There is honestly nothing that I do not like about the product. It is fantastic.

We just use it for payroll, and because the website and tools are simple to use, I can handle it quickly. It was simple to understand how they operated.

Although I believe I don't always receive them, I like that they provide us the most recent Federal & State employee law boards for posting. When I receive updates, it would be wonderful to receive a notification in my messages or an email. It's possible that I don't know where they are, but if I could obtain them via Paychex Flex, I could check to see if they have been updated or receive them whenever I need them.

It is very convenient to have access to the phone application, so you can access information and even run payroll from anytime / anywhere.
The add-on Stratustime allows you to track the non-exempt employees' hours and feeds directly into the payroll system.

Entering one-off payroll data such as expense reimbursement or a medical insurance payback has to be done at the individual level through individual checks.
it is difficult to customize access such as giving access to managers to accrue CTO days only, or giving them access to some HR info (number of vacation days, salary) without giving them access to all of it.
Also, the marketing is a little aggressive, the company offers so many other side services (writing your employee handbook, offering 401k, etc) that they call you too often with too many proposals, often different people for the same products.

We like that employees can log in and update their personal account info. such as new address ect. we also like that they can download their tax forms and so on

Every time we've had questions it seems as though no one there has the answers we need. This can be very frustrating!

Easy to use to clock in/out for the day. Helps to keep track of all hours worked daily, and accrual of PTO and vacations.

I haven't come across any cons thus far. No cons to report

Paychex is great for experienced and inexperienced, like myself, and submitting and maintaining a legal payroll. I have never had any tax issues since using their software and am very pleased with their response time .

It’s semi expensive. I was able to negotiate a fee but for a small business it’s a bigger expense.

It’s user-friendly with a couple of downfalls

Multiple issues with time keeping wouldn’t registered clock ins and clock out times

The customer service is helpful, although I wish I didn't have to call them as much as I do.

It's surprising to me that this company is a big competitor in this space. I think their software is extremely difficult to learn how to use and graphically looks like it was made in Windows 95. I use the administrative side mostly and have people coming to me all the time with questions because it's not easy or intuitive enough to learn on your own.

Software should be created and designed so that it's easy enough for people to pick up and start using immediately. PayChex Flex is not one of those softwares.

We used to rely on our accountant in the past. This is a great way to have access to anything at anytime. Another perk is that the employees are able to review their tax documents remotely as well.

This is not really related to the software itself, but the customer service continues to be an ongoing problem. God forbid if you receive a notice from EDD or IRS, you'll be chasing behind people to follow up. I wish whatever forms are submitted, we can have access to them from a particular page along with the outcomes.

Customer service - The worst
Assigned Account Manager - Does nothing but tell you to call Cust Service (see above)
Helpfulness - None
Expensive - YES
Knowledgeable - None
Compliant - Nope, set up CA payroll laws all wrong
Ease of system use - terrible, you need to coded everything yourself
Over selling - the best (how about fix your basic customer service and functionality before you continually try and up sell)

Compliance. Nice to have employee handbook online and learning center for compliance training is also helpful.
While Paychex payroll has strong workflow rules and meets general processing requirements, they make everything else so painful, therefore one could never recommend them. It would be like telling someone it's okay to cross a bridge that you know could collapse any moment and that you know is no longer maintained.

Assigned customer reps - unresponsive or not timely in responses until escalations. Paychex's lack of technology understanding - every time they upgrade they do not test what the impact to customer use and all their products. They had a big upgrade in late December 2015, their system was not accessible from early morning until the evening (end of year!). Multiple email and calls yielded no information. Finally at 4pm we get an email that they were experiencing problems and would be back live shortly. Who does that?
While learning center is a nice to have, spent an hour giving feedback and nothing changed, e.g., the CA Manager Anti- Sexual harassment training is 2.5 hours all in one shot. Not standard for training needs - asked them to break into 4 modules so it would not be daunting to busy leaders....crickets.

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.

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.

Very easy to view clocked in users, people on break, etc. As a manager it is easy to view and approve hours. It allows for a convienant way for staff to access paystubs and documentation.

Employees often have trouble with the site when punching in/out - the easiest to access option are buttons that move, and as a result it is easy to click the wrong button! Way more time clock corrections that we used to get. It is very difficult for staff to tell how much vacation time they have remiaining, they constantly have to ask for confirmation - very frustrating. It isn't always easy to tell that as a manager either, so we have had issues where people took more time than allocated. THE most frustrating aspect of it is when someone misses a punch - sometimes adding a missed punch is just a matter of clicking a box and filling in the correct time, other times switching a type of punch - like from start break to start meal is ridiculous and you can end up with a big mess. Have never seen a program that is so irritating to handle corrections like that. As a manager I hate working with this program.

When it works and the overloaded staff can actually assist you, it is an absolutely awesome service. I have used PayChex since about 2015. Back in the day my first representative was the absolute most amazing advisor and gave me confidence when speaking with her because I could tell she knew her job. Over time as we added more states and switched companies, our SUI numbers became switched, bank accounts and invoicing was not aligned.

Besides the reports that you are inundated with, the platform feels like it can actually perform, but truthfully it is pitiful java platform. The two factor auth is great but gets on my nerves and the fact that you cannot integrate with other identity providers or into your actual backoffice systems is a shame.

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!

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".

There is nothing - if I had the authority to switch, I would.

The interface is clunky and makes managing time punches difficult - there are nuances that are not intuitive where you have to enter or edit a punch in a very specific way or it will cause duplicates or the system will try to combine it with another punch which means that sometimes you have to do it multiple times in slightly different ways before you get the desired result. The reporting is also not intuitive, the wording used for templated report names is vague so that I have to go through many to find one that I want. We've experienced multiple and not infrequent issues with the program from employees logging in to a white screen, to managers not receiving notifications of time off requests which can cause significant issues.

I like the ability to log in and do what I need to do when it pertains to employee payroll activities. I also love the features that are offered to the employees by allowing them to check and edit information when they need to.

It is a little pricey compared to some. I don't have many negative comments about the service, but it can be difficult to reach customer service after hours.

It is convenient for small businesses and employees who work from home or don't have one check in location. It has some nice features for checking how many hours have been working if you are actually clocking in and out from the site itself. Once you actually figure things out and have your account set up, it's conveniently all right there in front of you to see what your sick time is, clock in/out, etc.
It keeps all your info from your previous jobs that have used the site PLUS holds your tax info conveniently for you, which is quite handy.

It's pretty difficult to navigate. A lot of the site doesn't really explain where to go or what to do so you kind of just have to poke around it until you figure things out. I guess it's kind of typical for sites like this. It's also kind of nightmare to get your log in info if you lose it, so just don't. You get locked out after 3 tries and then have to call the help desk and it turns into a pretty complicated ordeal. Conveniently though, the site log in remembers your info though. There is a LOT of maintenance, constantly and when you get messages in your inbox, they never seem to go away, but that's just nit-picky stuff that's not really important.

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.

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.

You get one dedicated representative for all your payroll issues. Also, processing payroll is easier.

The standard reporting function does not allow you run custom reports. You need to pay for custom reports.

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.

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 like the ability to see all pay stubs, schedule vacations, see time off accrued, and punch in and out.

It's a little more challenging if you have over 8 hour shifts, it defaults to having you punch in again. I also think it could be a bit more user friendly for vacation tracking.