Paylocity Web Pay Review – Payroll & HR in the Cloud

Paylocity Web Pay is a SaaS (Software as a Service) Payroll and Human Resources (HR) solution. Payroll & HR are important functions in any medium-sized business. After all, if the employees don’t get their paychecks, or the company violates the law, the entire enterprise can collapse.

But that doesn’t mean these functions get much respect from upper management. In many companies, Payroll & HR are treated as nothing more than backoffice services. Necessary, but not strategic or worthy of high-level attention.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As a Payroll or HR professional, your position gives you unique insights into key aspects of your company. The data found in your Payroll and HR software can be converted into important business intelligence.

With the right tools, you can convert this data into reports and analytics that can impact the company as a whole. By automating many of the mundane features of Payroll and HR work, you can free time and resources to make higher-level contributions to the company. In other words, the Payroll and HR functions of your company may not be getting the respect they deserve. Which means you may not be getting the respect you deserve.

Web Pay is designed to help Payroll and HR professionals break out of the small role they are currently playing in most companies. As Paylocity describes it, “Our mission is to elevate the profession of payroll and human resources out of the backroom and into the boardroom where it belongs.”

As a SaaS solution, Web Pay inherently offers real benefits over older computerized Payroll & HR solutions (not to mention old-school manual systems). With the software delivered to you as an Internet service, your company doesn’t need to worry about building a data center and staffing it. Paylocity is responsible for deploying, maintaining, and upgrading the software, as well as providing support when there is a problem. All you and your staff need to do is log in.

Paylocity also recognizes the importance of mobile devices in today’s work world. More and more employees own mobile devices, and use them for work functions as well as personal activities. This is both a blessing and a curse for your company. While allowing staff to use their personal devices for work can lead to greater productivity, it can also lead to problems. A particular headache in this scenario is ensuring compatibility of your company solutions with employee devices.

Assuming your company allows the use of personal mobile devices, you need Payroll and HR services that work well with them. An SaaS user interface designed for a desktop computer is going to function poorly on a mobile device. This reflects poorly on your department and company. It also annoys the young, tech-savvy recruits that most companies seek.

Paylocity addresses this issue by providing apps that run on most personal mobile devices. These apps look better and function better than an interface not designed for mobile. With them, users will be more efficient, and staff will be more engaged and productive.

If this sounds like the kind of solution that might be right for your company, continue reading to learn about the specific features and benefits of Paylocity’s Web Pay. We’ll start with the functions that appear on the Paylocity website under the Payroll heading.

Payroll Functions of Web Pay

As you would expect, Paylocity’s cloud-based Payroll service is designed to automate payroll related tasks and reduce the administrative burden they place on your team. But Web Pay offers more than just straight payroll services. The service helps you generate real analytics and insights you can use to contribute more to your company. It also addresses the closely-related activities of tax processing and compliance with the Affordable Care Act.

Payroll

Paylocity Web Pay provides all the key payroll services your medium-sized business needs, along with useful advanced features. Features like third party checks, direct deposits, and general ledger, as well as garnishments, payroll debit cards, and more, ensure that all your core needs are covered.

But consistent with their mission to upgrade the status of Payroll & HR, Paylocity’s service includes advanced features designed to make your team more productive, freeing time for other activities. Some of the advanced features are:

• Custom Templates – Create custom online forms to help you gather the Payroll and HR data you need quickly and efficiently.
• Custom Checklists – Create checklists to ensure that all your processes run smoothly.
• Pre-Process Register – Check and correct your register prior to processing payroll checks.

Web Pay also addresses two major burdens that you must handle to succeed. These are tax services and compliance with the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Tax Services

A complete Payroll service such as Paylocity Web Pay should address preparing and submitting taxes. Web Pay’s tax filing solution can handle this chore for you. Paylocity is an IRS Registered Reporting Agent for all 50 states of the USA, along with Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam.

But the benefits of Web Pay’s tax filing service extend beyond their doing the actual grunt work of preparing your taxes on time. Paylocity guarantees that your tax filings will be completed correctly as well as submitted on time. Backing up that guarantee is their commitment to assume all liability, penalty, or interest charges for any mistakes they make with your company’s taxes.

As part of this process, Web Pay monitors payroll processing and automatically alerts you to any data-validity issues that come up. They also balance your tax accounts daily to ensure that your payments and returns go out to the relevant taxing authorities on time.

Some of the additional functions of the Web Pay tax filing service are:

• All verified federal returns are electronically filed within 24 hours
• All funds are reconciled by tax code every day
• You can track all federal and state deposits on your behalf
• Resolves tax notices on your behalf
• Prepare and file all federal and state unemployment and withholding returns
• Prepare all W-2 forms and file them with the Social Security Administration
• Generate quarterly and year-end reports

Think of how much time you and your staff can free up by letting someone else deal with 940s, 941s, 1099Ms, W-2s, 1094-Cs, 1095-Cs and all the other tax forms that need to be processed. Let this powerful solution liberate your people.

Healthcare Reform

Complying with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) imposes a significant burden on every mid-sized business. With reams of complex rules, and the continuing phase/in of requirements, simply keeping up with your responsibilities can be a major project. Paylocity offers two ACA Compliance solutions to help your company address this task efficiently while ensuring compliance.

ACA Enhanced

This is the most comprehensive ACA solution Paylocity offers. As their full analysis and compliance solution, it can greatly reduce the manual effort required to comply with the Employer Shared Responsibilities Act.

Among the capabilities of ACA Enhanced are these:

• Automated capture and electronic filing of 1094-C and 1095-C forms
• Alerts and notifications to protect against compliance issues
• IRS notice resolution for any errors or issues that arise
• Tracking of employee eligibility, affordability, and large employer status

ACA Essentials

A basic reporting tool for companies that cannot use ACA Enhanced. It offers electronic filing of 1094-C and 1095-C forms.

HR Functions of Web Pay

Web Pay offers cloud-based (SaaS) versions of all the HR functions you might expect. Because it combines and automates much of the work formerly done manually by HR staff, it can generate faster, more accurate results than older methods. You can use the additional time and resources freed by this service to work on analyzing HR information and upgrading your department’s status within your company.

Some of the functions delivered by the HR solution include:

• Rate History tracking
• EEO Tracking & Reports
• Dependent Tracking
• Work Eligibility/Authorization Tracking
• Retirement Plans
• Employee Biographies
• A Company Directory
• Emergency Contact Recording

Beyond core HR functions like the above, Web Pay offers these additional functions:

• Self-Service – Give employees & managers access to their information to free HR of this burden.
• Reporting & Analytics – Generate key business intelligence using current & historic data.
• Onboarding – Gather new employee data faster & engage them from day one.

Let’s take a more detailed look at each of these additional functions.

Self-Service

One great way to improve communication with the staff while reducing the burden on HR is to have an HR web portal. It is where staff can find key personal information and management can communicate with everyone without the waste of printed materials or mass emailings. The Paylocity Self-Service portal does this and more.

Not surprisingly, the portal offers different abilities to regular employees and to management. For employees, the portal allows:

• Access to pay, benefits, and time-off information without HR assistance. Employees can view and update their personal information through the portal directly.
• An easy way to do things like clock in and out, and submit time-off requests.
• A central location for all company information and updates, as well as important links. No more wasting time and money on paper documents that quickly become obsolete.

Management staff have access to all of this for their own personal use. In addition, they gain the following abilities:

• Access to personnel information on their direct reports. This includes the ability to impersonate direct reports to resolve problems.
• Initiate pay-rate changes. Route these changes for approval.
• Approve changes and manage assignments.
• Assign supervisors to direct and indirect reports.

Today’s tech-savvy employees and management expect easy access to this kind of information, and the Self-Service portal provides it without burdening your HR staff.

Reporting & Analytics

Today’s businesses generate a huge amount of information. The problem is turning that information and raw data into useful business intelligence. Web Pay’s reporting and analytics features do this for you. And since Paylocity never purges or archives your data, you will have easy access to this valuable historic resource whenever you need it.

Paylocity’s tools boost your productivity while generating the business intel you need. You can schedule reports to be generated automatically. The dashboard also allows you to view real-time analytics and includes a Favorites function that lets you tag certain reports for easy access whenever you need it. Here are a few of the types of reports and other intel that can be generated:

• Over 100 Standard Reports
• HR Insight Charts
• ACA Reports
• Point-In-Time Reports

If you need a custom report that isn’t included in this large library, Paylocity has you covered with their Ad-hoc Report Writer. In the past, it was often necessary to gather Payroll data and HR data from separate databases and merge it manually before you could do much with it.

Because Paylocity designed their services to use a combined database of information, this is no longer a problem. All your Payroll and HR data is accessible from the same dashboard, eliminating one more time-consuming and mistake-prone process.

Onboarding

Traditionally, onboarding new staff has been a tedious process. Your new employee fills out piles of printed forms. Your HR staff manually enters the data into the appropriate systems, sometimes entering the same data multiple times to get it into different systems. It is a time-consuming, boring process for all concerned.

But onboarding doesn’t have to be done in the old manner. Paylocity’s Onboarding system brings this process into the modern world. Using their mobile-responsive Onboarding portal, current staff and new hires benefit from a fast, easy, automated way to get past all the bureaucracy and on to regular work.

The mobile-responsive Onboarding portal allows new employees to enter their data using the mobile devices they are most comfortable with. You can customize the portal for step-by-step information gathering that matches the exact needs of your organization. The new employees status is displayed on in Onboarding dashboard, so everyone knows exactly where each new hire is in the process.

Examples of the information that can be gathered during these steps include:

• Contact details
• Direct deposit information
• Withholding forms
• Personal information to create an employee profile

You can also customize the portal to deliver welcome messages and other company information, even display introductory videos. There is no comparison between the Onboarding dashboard and traditional piles of printed documents.

Talent Management Functions of Web Pay

Recruiting and motivating talent is always crucial to business success. Web Pay’s Talent Management solution is an ideal tool for attracting top talent, building employee engagement, and improving job satisfaction, while generating strategic business intelligence.

From their Applicant Tracking Systems to built-in 360° reviews, goal management tools, and their peer-based recognition system, Web Pay gives you the tools you need to manage your company’s talent for maximum effect.

Applicant Tracking Systems

Web Pay offers two applicant tracking systems. Their Paylocity Enterprise Recruiting solution is designed for organizations in the SMB space that need the most robust solution. This solution is powered by their partnership with ClearCompany, a SaaS talent management firm.

Paylocity Enterprise Recruiting offers high-powered features such as:

• Complete applicant tracking, including automated communication
• Flexible candidate search and organization
• Instant background checks
• Automatic talent pools to organize applicants, resumes, and background checks

For small and medium businesses, Web Pay offers Web ATS. This solution is powered by the ATS OnDemand applicant tracking system. This system aims to give you the lowest TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) while providing features like:

• Unlimited document storage
• Electronic signatures for downloading documents
• A custom branded portal

Whichever of these solutions you choose, they work smoothly with Web Pay to make recruiting simpler and more intuitive than ever before.

360° Reviews & Goal Management

One of the best ways to get a full sense of an employee’s contribution to the company is through the 360° review process. By soliciting input from co-workers as well as the employee’s boss, both the employee and the manager get a better understanding of the employee’s skills and contributions.

To help with this process, Web Pay brings the process online. With it, you can:

• Create custom review fields matching your organization’s priorities
• Send automatic notifications for tasks related to the review
• Request feedback from across the organization’s

As a manager, you have the ability to view each employee’s appraisals and their assigned goals in one place. This includes the option for employee self-appraisals. Use it to ensure that both manager and employee are clear on, and agree to, the employee’s goals.

Impressions Peer-to-Peer Recognition Tool

While pay and promotions are powerful motivators in business, they are not the only ones. Recognition by peers (or lack of it) is also a powerful influence, particularly for younger people. “Research shows that a significant percentage of employees leave their jobs because they are not recognized,” says Steve Beauchamp, President and CEO of Paylocity.

Paylocity’s Impressions peer-to-peer recognition tool builds this kind of motivation directly into your systems.

Impressions allows employees to easily recognize other employees for jobs well done. It helps managers encourage desired behaviors through recognition of those behaviors. It allows employees to post their accomplishments to their employee profiles for additional recognition. And it allows employees to update their profiles, potentially even linking them to social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

In addition, you can use data from Impressions at review time to give you one more perspective on employee performance. This non-traditional tool fits our modern social media world and could have a significant positive impact on your organization.

Benefits Administration

While Payroll and Benefits are usually separate departments, employee benefits directly affect payroll. As employee benefits change, so do their payroll deductions. Manually updating payroll information due to changes in deductions sucks up lots of resources, especially during open enrollment periods. And the backlash from mistakes in this process is harsh, as employees really do not like it when their paychecks are incorrect.

This is why Paylocity’s Web Benefits enrollment service is fully integrated with Web Pay. When open enrollment comes around, employee benefit selections generate changes in the deductions from their pay. Because the Benefits service is integrated with Web Pay, those deduction changes get sent to Web Pay and reflected in Payroll.

Time & Labor

Paylocity offers a Time & Labor solution called Web Time. While not a part of the Web Pay product, Web Time works seamlessly with Web Pay. Because the two services work together, your team is freed from the tedium of manual time tracking and data entry, while accuracy and compliance are ensured.

Integrations

While Web Pay provides many of the services you need to handle Payroll and HR functions, you will probably want to work with additional vendors as well. This can be a real headache. If your Paylocity services don’t work smoothly with your other vendors, your staff will have to bridge the differences between the two manually. This means tedious work for your staff, lost time whenever information travels across the boundary, and plenty of opportunities for mistakes to creep into your processes.

Paylocity’s integration with outside vendors can solve this problem for you. They provide 360° integration with many vendors, and 180° integration with hundreds more. By choosing to work with vendors that have some level of integration with Paylocity, you can greatly reduce or even eliminate the human labor that would otherwise be required to move information back and forth.

Let’s take a moment to clarify what the two different levels of integration mean in terms of the flow of information.

360° integration means that employee information only needs to be entered once. The information then flows between your Paylocity services and the other vendors automatically. This frees you from assigning staff and burning resource to do this. The following illustration from Paylocity shows how this works:

180° integration allows you to import personnel information from outside vendors into your Web Pay with a single click. This greatly reduces the amount of manual labor required to keep personnel information up to date, but doesn’t flow information back to the outside vendors when it changes in Web Pay. This illustration shows how the information flows with 180° integration.

While the complete list of vendors that integrate with Paylocity is much too long to include here, some of the better known vendors they work with are:

• Principal® Financial Group
• Bank of America
• Charles Schwab
• Deutsche Bank

Curious to see which vendors Paylocity is integrated with for the services you are interested in? You can go to the drop-down list on the Integrations page of the Paylocity website to find out. Select the particular categories of integration you are interested in. Paylocity returns a list of specific vendors for each category that you select.

Resources

The Resources section of the Paylocity website includes a good-sized collection of information that will help you decide whether you want to work with them, and help get your team up to speed if you do. The resources are divided into:

• The Content Library – Ebooks, infographics, Videos, and Whitepapers with general information on Payroll and HR as well as specific information about Paylocity solutions.
• Client Training – Online training in all of the services that Paylocity offers. You get access to this training as soon as you become a client of theirs.
• The Paylocity Blog – Topics and trends related to Paylocity and its services. A pull-down list at the top of the blog page allows you to easily find the kid of posts you are looking for.
• News – News stories about Paylocity and external events that affect their customers.

Conclusion

In many organizations, Payroll and HR take a back seat to Marketing, Sales, and other departments. Everyone knows they are necessary, but they are seldom considered “strategic.” That’s a shame, since Payroll and HR have access to important information that can help the company achieve its goals. The lower status of these departments is also detrimental to the careers of the people who work in them.

Paylocity Web Pay can help you change this situation. By automating many of your processes, it free up staff time to work on more strategic priorities. By bringing information online and into a combined database, it captures information that was previously difficult or impossible to get at. And by giving you a wide range of reporting and analytic tools, it allows you to extract that information and turn it into a valuable strategic resource.

Paylocity offers a wide variety of related services, along with a large number of integrations and partnerships with third-parties. As a result, deciding whether Paylocity Web Pay is the right solution for your business can be complicated. One approach would be to go to the Paylocity Resources page and review all the information there to increase your understanding of the services they offer.

Another approach would be to engage the Paylocity Sales Team by phoning them, initiating an online chat or requesting a demonstration. If you want to go this route, click any “Request Demo” link on the Paylocity website, or go directly to the Paylocity Contact page.

Read more about Paylocity Web Pay on DiscoverCloud or our knowledge base.