Paylocity review

The people at Paylocity recognize that HR teams want to do more – but they’re often bogged down in tedious administrative tasks.

To that end, Paylocity’s HR and payroll solutions place a strong focus on automation, process simplification, and ease of compliance to give your teams the time they need to think strategically and have a greater impact.

There’s a lot of emphasis on employee experience in this tool, too, thanks to a smart set of employee engagement features. The most recent addition to the app is an AI assistant that can streamline your experience.

Paylocity believes that by combining technology with humanity, it can produce the ideal, all-around HR and payroll solution.

Paylocity: Plans and pricing

As with most HR solutions, Paylocity’s pricing is devised on a case-by-case basis, with no concrete costing information provided on the company’s website.

While this enables you to pick the modules you need and build a package that is suited to your business, the lack of pricing transparency can make initial budgeting and comparison difficult, and adding plenty of modules could see your pricing scale quickly.

The company says that sample pricing ranges from $18 to $32 per employee per month, with potential setup fees as an additional cost. Those figures tally with what we’ve seen on third-party sites that list approximate pricing for the Paylocity solution.

Paylocity: Features

With a name like Paylocity and a company ethos that “everything leads back to payroll,” it’s no surprise that this app features strong financial functionality.

Its payroll options are completely customizable, and once you’ve built processes that work for your organization, you can review and run a complete payroll in a few clicks – reducing manual work for your HR teams.

Data flows directly into the payroll system from your employee database, and the system automatically flags employees with discrepancies. It’s both fast and easy to set up general ledger mapping.

Paylocity’s Payroll Readiness Dashboard highlights critical tasks that need attention before your next payment, and a tax geolocation system can audit your staff to ensure they’re paying the correct taxes. It’s also possible to pay local and global employees from the system when using Paylocity.

If your business has grown and has global needs, Paylocity also offers global payroll services alongside consulting, compliance, and treasury management, though these services may incur additional fees because Paylocity is primarily designed for US payroll requirements.

Paylocity’s excellent payroll capabilities are paired with good core HR features. You get centralized document storage and custom, automated workflows across the platform – alongside automation templates to make deploying those workflows even easier.

There’s plenty of personalization available here, too, because you can add unlimited custom fields for tracking and reporting that reflect your organizational needs.

On top of all this, real-time analytics and dashboards that help you analyze your workforce and make smarter, data-based decisions, and AI-powered tools throughout the app improve search functionality and answer your basic questions.

Paylocity’s reporting and analytics revolve around a module called Modern Workforce Index. This insight and benchmarking tool is a relatively new addition to the solution, and it collates sentiment, utilization, and organizational health data to track the health of your business when compared to the rest of the market.

It’ll track how employees are using Paylocity to inform discussions around ROI, it’ll suggest how you can make improvements, and illustrate your progress over time.

The employee self-service module enables your staff to access and modify payroll and HR data via web browsers and the Paylocity mobile app.

Paylocity’s time and attendance management tools include automated policy enforcement, real-time notifications, and in-depth analytics – so you can easily spot trends, plan shifts, monitor budgets, and reduce administrative overheads.

The app offers AI-enhanced shift recommendations, open shift claiming and shift swapping, and a range of time capture options, from badges and biometrics to apps, kiosks, and smart watches. Geolocation, fingerprint validation, and facial recognition are all supported.

Paylocity’s in-built social network supports greater employee collaboration and engagement, and it’s available on the mobile app too. It’s got a company feed, “ask an expert” options, and AI-assisted announcement creation. Users can even “follow” particularly active colleagues.

A module called Employee Voice collects automatic feedback from your staff that you can then use for analysis and reporting, and you can build customized employee recognition programs with rewards linked to your budget to foster connections throughout your workforce.

The tool’s community engagement features are particularly impressive, so it’s no surprise that Paylocity describes them as a “crown jewel” of the app.

Guided benefits support is available for both providers and employees, so deployment and enrollment are easier, and you’ll get notifications about eligibility changes and benefit requests.

Paylocity supports a broad range of benefit options and can manage flexible benefits, too, and the system will help you manage benefit compliance at the same time. It also enables you to look after your technology, with an asset management module that tracks hardware assignments and locations – perfect for keeping track of laptops, smartphones, and other equipment.

This solution also includes a broad slate of recruitment options, including candidate screening, headcount planning tools, and self-service interview scheduling. HR teams can use automated job posting to over 20,000 job boards alongside integrations with LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Indeed.

Pre-written templates and AI tools accelerate job requisition, and you can keep recruitment moving by sending emails and text messages from within the platform. It’s even possible to define roles and compensation from within Paylocity by browsing market data – and then create and send personalized offer packages to candidates.

Once talent is recruited, onboarding is bolstered by automation, in-built compliance tools, background checks, pre-boarding tasks in the mobile app video welcomes, auto-assigned training, and team introductions.

Employee performance is monitored using easy feedback collection, 360-degree reviews, and talent assessment templates. Training is handled by an interactive environment that features a vast library of courses, and you can use Paylocity to create, define, and manage your compensation strategy using company and market data. The system supports annual increases and customized bonus payments.

Paylocity supports hundreds of third-party integrations, including Microsoft 365 and Dynamics, Google Workspace, Dropbox, Slack, HubSpot, and QuickBooks.

Hundreds more integrations are available in the Paylocity Marketplace across categories like benefits, finance, compliance, health, and recruiting. The solution also includes API support for creating your own integrations.

As usual with HR solutions, you’ll only get many of these features if you include those modules in your custom package. With Paylocity, we’d advise you to check the international payroll situation before you invest.

Paylocity is a US-first business, and while the company does offer global payroll services, you may need to use additional third-party integrations to ensure smooth operations.

Elsewhere, while Paylocity offers good analytics, reporting, and customization, SAP is stronger for reporting; you’ll find more in-depth customization with some rival products, and the mobile app doesn’t have feature parity with the desktop product.

Paylocity: Ease of use

There’s no denying that Paylocity is packed with features – and there’s no denying that the team has done a decent job with the interface.

It’s consistent and straightforward, with a navigation pane on the left and a dashboard that’s packed with quick links to common actions. That dashboard presents loads of information, including key details about pay, budgeting, timesheets, urgent tasks, activity, and more.

The dashboard is customizable – you can rearrange the location of the widgets or remove them entirely – but you can’t build your own, and the data displayed in each widget is hard-coded.

Employee and equipment records are well-designed and easy to navigate, and the reporting section is comprehensive, with dozens of options quickly available if you know where to look.

The payroll module does a great job of presenting your payroll options and enabling you to easily start your next run. The community section is great, with a social media-style feed, team-specific groups, and easy-to-spot pinned announcements.

The Modern Workforce Index is one of the more colorful parts of the app, with a dial that gives an easy indicator of your company’s score – and you can dive further into the data to track sentiment, health, and organization across a variety of charts.

Paylocity’s interface does a good job of collating the tool’s wealth of features, but it has some minor downsides.

The data-rich, busy interface could prove overwhelming at first, especially for users who aren’t familiar with complex software packages, and if you want a visually attractive interface, then you would be better off shopping elsewhere.

We’ve seen user sentiment online suggest that implementation experiences vary – some customers experience smooth deployments, while others describe a lengthy implementation due to the complexity of the software.

Paylocity: Support

Paylocity offers live phone support from 6am to 7.30pm Central Time between Monday and Friday. While it’s not unusual for HR solution providers to restrict phone support to working days, not many offer the breadth of hours as Paylocity, so that’s a plus. It’s also possible to email Paylocity for live, responsive support during those hours, too.

The company assigns customers an account manager and support team to help with implementation and ongoing questions.

As with many HR solution providers, Paylocity offers an online knowledge base, an AI assistant to answer product questions, and a selection of live webinars and on-demand training sessions.

Paylocity: The Competition

Paylocity targets its solutions at businesses of all sizes, though it traditionally focuses on SMBs. While that’s a lucrative and popular part of the market, it brings it up against some strong competitors.

There aren’t many solutions that are as effective as Paylocity when it comes to payroll, but if you’d like to explore your options, then RUN Powered by ADP is a strong contender for smaller businesses, and ADP Workforce Now is the company’s offering for larger organizations.

If you’d like more automation in your HR workflows, then Rippling should be on your list of potential options, and BambooHR is an all-rounder that’s worth consideration, too. And if you need an enterprise-level option, add SAP SuccessFactors to your list of contenders.

Paylocity: Final verdict

Paylocity is one of the most feature-rich HR and payroll solutions you’ll find anywhere, and it’s particularly strong when it comes to financial features, automation, and employee engagement – its community tools are excellent, and the app does a good job of collating so much data and sentiment into useful, actionable information.

There are some trade-offs, though: the depth of functionality available here means Paylocity could seem overwhelming, especially for inexperienced users, and we’ve seen reports of lengthy implementation procedures. There’s no transparency on pricing, either.

That said, if you’re a mid-sized business looking for a powerhouse HR and payroll solution, Paylocity is a strong contender.