olafskyansian

Now now...they are making huge strides in the world of .csv files too

I highly doubt this is a "new" product. They have offered payroll/HR/benefits for eons. What would be game changing is if it is free...

I have a lot of respect for what Zenefits has done to date in shaking up the insurance space, but you have to REALLY question what the heck is going on with Parker's leadership there.

What is going on that the founder/CEO has enough time to chastise an engineer candidate on Quora and put out factually inaccurate posts on topics like healthcare reform (he had something out on LinkedIn a few weeks back) but doesn't have the foresight to build a "real" integration with a payroll vendor that has one available (and an established track record of integrating with competitors in many cases mind you).

You read the glassdoor reviews of Zenefits and you get this picture where no one knows what they are doing. All symptomatic of a company in hyper-growth mode, I get that. The questions becomes, does Parker have the leadership chops to see this through?

Here is ADP's response to this brouhaha.

http://www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-an...

What I don't get is if the integration is one-way from Zenefits to ADP (and not vice versa) why all the data allegedly being pulled back from ADP?

When you think about where the $$$ is, they DIRECTLY compete.

I think the thing people don't realize is that there is way more money in insurance than there is in payroll, ADP knows this and so does Paychex.

At my last company, I think we paid about $90 per employee per year for payroll processing, W-2s and employee self-service.

A broker commission for health insurance is conservatively 3% of the total annual premium. So with an average family premium (employee and employer) hovering around $17k a year, the commission on that plan would be $500+ dollars, well over five times what you could earn by actually doing payroll. an employee electing single coverage with a total premium around $7k a year is still far and away more valuable than "payroll"

If you look at ADPs earnings transcripts for the past year, you'll see this area is where the growth is at. It's even stronger at Paychex where benefits constitutes basically all of their growth.

I'm pretty sure that aside from Zen Payroll and Intuit there is no actual API in place.

Why on God's green earth should a change I make in Zenefits take two friggin' days to show up in ADP? That's not an API. That's a high-school dropout earning minimum wage entering into ADP they changes you made in Zenefits.

I don't agree with ADP's heavy handed approach, but if this "integration" is Zenefits' service, they have half a billion in the bank to make it better now.