We are a small company with 225 employees in 2 states, but our payroll policies are far too complex for ADP to handle. The worst problem is having two payroll groups: hourly employees paid weekly & salaried employees paid semi-monthly. ADP can't handle this arrangement, so we are set up as two separate "companies." This means two sets of reports, no Company Totals, & endless complications.

Their Customer Service is nonexistent. A few months ago, I finally went to an Advanced ReportSmith class, after having figured it out myself (mostly) & used it for three years. The class was excellent. However, it was given on a newer version of the program & the disk I made in class won't work back in the office. I e-mailed the Southwest regional office to ask when we could expect the upgrade, & got an e-mail back telling me to call the Sales Dept. on the phone. I did, but nobody EVER CALLED ME BACK. This was 3 months ago, I have not heard from ADP at all, & we still don't have the latest version.

The first year we had our 401k, I ran an end-of-year report for compliance reporting purposes. It was the last working day of the year, I had 2 hours left, & I discovered that the salaried people & hourly people had the 401k accumulator codes switched, so that on my report some people had year-to-date information & others had quarter-to-date information. Not only did I get no assistance in fixing the problem, the person I spoke to couldn't seem to understand why I was making such a big fuss about it. (If you don't have ADP, the "accumulator" data are very transient. If you don't capture ytd data on the last payroll, it's gone forever.) The next year they made a different mistake on the last payroll that screwed up my 401k reporting AGAIN, & they reacted with similar nonchalance. I would not try to use their 401k Service if my life depended on it.

We've tried several payroll companies, & they're all about as bad as each other. Someday, we're going to bring it in-house, but in the meantime, it would be going from the frying pan into the fire to switch. If somebody could write a payroll service bureau program that actually worked, they could make a mint of money, because no one has yet.

Recommended: No