Zenefits currently handles payroll at my company. The machine isn't un-sturdy, it's become rusty, lost all lubrication, and seized up. They need to fix their software before allowing anyone to sign up and use it.

I haven't gone 1 weekly pay period in 2016 without some issue (late, missing, short paychecks, shifting paydays) or another. But I can't convince my CEO to go with some pros (ahem, ADP), yet. But they are very sales-centric and realize they have a problem... so there's some hope for them.

Everyone here is pretty frustrated with the situation. And the next time Zenefits fuck up, which I presume will be Friday, I will submit my already drafted ADP-Or-I-Resign-Immediately letter with timeline of their 8+ previous fuckups.

Edit*: It's 2016, not 2015... so every week we've use it

> I haven't gone 1 weekly pay period in 2015 without some issue (late, missing, short paychecks, shifting paydays) or another.

If you want to motivate a change, you may want to research applicable labor law: for instance, in California, failure to pay all wages due, on the posted payday, is not only a violation subject to civil penalties, but also a crime.

http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_paydays.htm http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....

Thank you, I'm not a CA resident, but I will look into those links. I wish I would have know that a couple of years ago - I'm certain that info will help some HN reader though.

We use Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll) with zero issues and their UX is far better than ADP.

/no affiliation with them

The unfortunate thing is we were using Gusto in 2015, and I loved them too. I think the reason why we changed was dumb - higher-up preferred the UI/UX - but really hope it was something more complicated than that.

Hopefully, we'll be back in a couple of weeks. I don't think Zenefits can go 2 weeks without something going bad for us. If anyone from Gusto is reading this, I have a CEO that needs a good old-fashioned "we miss you" phone call.

Hi!

I'm one of the co-founders and CTO of Gusto! If you feel comfortable putting me in touch with the appropriate person in your company, I'd love to send over that "we miss you call"!

Compliance and accuracy has been #1 for us from the very start. I'd love to see if we can address any other issues so you can come back to us!

My contact is in my profile

Please take a look at your buggy csv exports. They output the same data and can't do team summaries even though they should. I raised this issue last week and the support rep told me I should be using PDFs instead of csv. She clearly has no idea how payroll works and how important it is to run a reconciliation of the payroll.

Hi Casey!

Can you shoot me an email (in my profile) wit a little more detail about the CSV report? Email me a report and show me what is wrong with it -- I'll personally make sure it's fixed.

Gusto CTO, I think now is your time to shine and take down this issue and champion it. :-)

Done, Thank you!!!

And another Zenefits loss occurs right before our very eyes. We have just now literally watched the utter failure to deliver service lose revenue for Zenefits.

I hope the Gusto guy wins back the business.

Zenefits, crash and burn. It seems you deserve it.

I feel you. You should consider trying out Namely (namely dot com)! Our payroll product and HCM software is easy to use, looks great and might be more affordable for your company than ADP's solutions. As well, our sales folks and specialists are really great to work with and are a treasure trove of information about anything benefits and payroll.

Email me (email address is in my profile) if you'd like more information or have any questions!

interesting that you've had issues with your paychecks... <logs into Zenefits to check>

It may be the issues we are having have to do with the fact that we did not use their recommended default values for payroll, e.g. we initially defined the paydays, reporting days, and the requisite 3 days between reporting and actual funds transfer. Now that Zenefits is dictating our accounting for payroll schedule, we may be able to get around many of the software issues we've experienced up to this point. I still get 2-3 emails a week letting me know I got paid, once, and it's confusing always checking if I got double/triple paid too (which also happened). Of course, this may not be 100% Zenefits fault in every case, but the software makes it easy to make mistakes.

I've experienced this in another side of the world--ad agencies. Very frequently accounts were sold on one thing and since the commissions were tied to closing the deal with the fattest margin possible and were completely divorced from the long-term success of the account, often times accounts ended up with lots of promises, and an understaffed, burnt-out team desperately trying to keep them happy because it was their asses if the account left.

When I got to a level where I played a major role in pitches, scoping, and staffing teams, it was definitely a struggle at times to make sure an account was staffed in a way where the fees would support the staffing that aligned with a client's expectations of the work and deliverables they would receive.

Ultimately we were able to get to a much better understanding of that through comparing the cost of retaining a client vs. the cost of new client acquisition, making our SOWs much more specific, and making sure people whose success was measured in the longevity of that relationship (ie. me and the people who would ultimately own the account) were involved in the scoping/pricing/contract part of the process with sales.

That didn't fully get rid of the friction or differing incentives, but it made sure that there was a healthy data-driven discussion around the potential outcomes of selling in one thing vs. another.

Unfortunately it took things getting worse before they got better to bring about that change, but it happened nonetheless. It does require buy-in from the top down though, and I'm not sure that is something that could realistically happen in a heavily-funded company with...optimistic...sales goals.

With SaaS services this is pretty straightforward, especially for small-medium sized companies: you don't want transactional sales. You end up with sales at all costs culture, and the mess is left for the account managers/dev/support teams to deal with and very unhappy customers. Building a good relationship based sales team is hard and slow, and frankly it's very hard to find sales folks who aren't colored by previous transactional experiences/mentoring. This culture creation slows down the trajectory of a start up with high growth pressures, hence why we see this sort of stuff. I've gotten my fair share of heavy handed, transactional sales calls from some other big named startups and it's always a negative experience. I can just imagine a boiler room environment in most of these startups.