Paylocity
Paylocity is an easy-to-use HR and payroll software designed for small businesses and SMEs. It accelerates core HR processes and automates timely payroll, ensuring timely payment with minimum compliance risks. With Paylocity’s robust compliance tools and Airbase acquisition, you can streamline payroll, manage expenses, and ensure seamless operations—all from a single platform.
Features
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Global payroll service in 100+ countries
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Self-service portal for the employees
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Talent management with 360-degree feedback
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Time tracking and shift scheduling
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Smooth benefit management for employees and admins
Pros
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Integrated video functionality for personalized communication
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Real-time data analytics with reports and dashboard
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Tools like Community and Learning for employee improvement
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Simple and transparent benefit enrollment
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Key metrics and trend identification for data-based decision
Cons
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Does not offer a free trial or free forever plan
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Pricing is not transparent
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No customer support on weekends
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Sales team response time could improve
HR Software Review Methodology
Geekflare assessed the essential Paylocity HR and Payroll features for SMBs, focusing on usability, affordability, and scalability. To ensure an unbiased review, we collected accurate data from Paylocity’s official site and examined user feedback from multiple trusted sources, providing a well-rounded, detailed evaluation.
What is Paylocity?
Paylocity is an all-in-one HR solution offering dedicated products for payroll, workforce management, HR, talent management, benefits, employee experience, and data insights. To fuel its clients’ success, Paylocity offers personalized and on-demand support.
Paylocity also includes the features of its acquired spend management platform, Airbase. It expanded Paylocity’s capabilities and offers better value to its customers from a single platform. This Paylocity review will discuss its major features and show how companies can benefit from this payroll solution.
Paylocity Products Offering
Major products included in the Paylocity suite are:
Payroll
Paylocity’s payroll lets you submit the payroll through a four-step navigation flow. Important payroll data like time, manpower allocation, and charges are automatically imported into the app, eliminating manual and inaccurate data entry. It allows you to configure check types, time off accruals, and reporting features according to their workflow and work process.
Paylocity supports setting up General Ledger Mapping and offers you 40+ configurable pre-submit audit flags to locate anomalies. Its Payroll Readiness Dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of crucial payroll tasks before the payday. It ensures tax compliance by letting you audit individual employees with tax geolocation. Paylocity’s tax experts prepare, file, review, and process tax documents on time.
Global Payroll
Paylocity offers global payroll services with its integrated payroll management platform, which provides real-time access to data across 100+ countries. It enables companies to make payments to local and global salaried employees from one place. With its dedicated tool, businesses can generate global or country-wise payroll reports.
Paylocity’s global expansion and consulting services team guides companies to adhere to unique statutory and compliance requirements in over one hundred countries. It also helps with in-country bank account setup, in-country talent acquisition, customized employment agreements, local labor requirements, and country-based compensation and benefits packages.
Human Resources
Paylocity’s process automation engine allows companies to automate manual tasks like onboarding using templates. Users can generate customizable reports using unlimited fields such as text, dropdown, number, date, and checkbox. It provides a secure and central location to store all employee documents and enables a holistic view of the employees. Admins can make informed staffing decisions with full positional and seal-level visibility of the employees.
Paylocity’s Employee Self-Service lets employees access paystubs and tax forms, request time off, update personal data, and collaborate with their teammates 24/7. Its intuitive dashboard provides seamless access to work authorizations, compliance data, and certifications to reduce compliance risk. Businesses can also get assistance on policies, training, and other best practices from HR Edge.
Talent Management
Paylocity makes the application process easy for candidates with features like application through a QR code or texting a number, self-scheduling live interviews, and quick one-way video interviews. It also makes applicant tracking effortless for the companies.
Its mobile-friendly onboarding allows new hires to complete pre-boarding tasks from anywhere. Paylocity offers a personalized dashboard for your employees, where they will get the welcome message, share their interests, and opt for training sessions. Its Journals feature allows you to keep track of performance throughout the year and later, utilize that to create performance improvement plans. You can identify when the employees are ready for the next step with a talent assessment template and 360 feedback from their peers and managers.
Paylocity helps manage your company’s compensation strategy aligned with its guidelines and business goals. It enables you to create an interactive learning environment and track in-person learning for employee development. I am sure these features will help companies attract top talent and successfully retain them.
Benefits Administration
Paylocity offers Benefits Decision Support in collaboration with Reclaim, so your employees can choose the most suitable plan. Its intuitive dashboard lets you see key metrics, admin alerts, and enrolment statuses clearly, while its reporting feature generates insights for better budgeting. It even allows employees to contribute and submit claims from the same platform.
Paylocity’s automation tools free employees from manual tasks and streamline their participation in crucial tasks. They help you manage compliance and obtain HR and payroll data from relevant applications through seamless integration.
Employee Experience
Paylocity has an online social collaboration hub for the employees where they can stay informed of what is happening in the organization through a mobile app. The software keeps your employees engaged, collects their feedback, and creates action plans for improvement, all from the same place. You can create customized employee recognition programs, quantify the employee experience, track real-time program metrics, and compare benchmarks using Paylocity.
Time Management
I have noticed that many HR and payroll software do not have time tracking and scheduling feature. Hence, businesses need to choose another tool for that, which is many cases give rise to issues, such as data synchronization errors, increased administrative workload, and higher costs. I appreciate how Paylocity incorporated several useful time management features that will help you skip the above problems.
The time and attendance management feature of Paylocity allows you to automatically enforce policy, receive real-time notifications, and generate detailed analytics. It also offers employees self-service options and enables admins to review and approve time cards quickly. You can ensure flexible employee scheduling with smart forecasting, AI-predicted scheduling, shift swapping, and open shift claiming.
For accurate time tracking, Paylocity offers badges, biometric time clocks, mobile apps, tablet kiosks, or web apps. Businesses can use geolocation, facial recognition, and fingerprint validation for additional security. To verify breaks and waivers, it supports advanced attestation. Paylocity’s advanced features, such as shift recommendations, budgeting, forecasting, and scheduling by attribute, help companies do more than standard scheduling.
What are the Benefits of Using Paylocity?
The benefits of using Paylocity include streamlined payroll process management, employee recognition and rewards, time and attendance tracking, and more.
Streamlined Payroll and HR Processes
Paylocity simplifies payroll and HR processes by automating regular tasks such as time tracking, employee attendance, payroll, and tax filings. You do not have to enter data manually which will reduce the risk of errors. Besides saving time, it allows HR teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
Attract Talents
Paylocity offers a user-friendly interface and useful features for the job applicants. With an easy, quick, and automated application process, it demonstrates the commitment of the your company to ensure candidate satisfaction. By offering a pleasant experience, it helps you attract top talents in the market.
Employee Self-service
Paylocity empowers your employees with a self-service portal, giving them an access to their personal information, pay stubs, and time-off request procedures. It gives the employees a sense of control and satisfaction while reducing the administrative burden of your human resource teams. By choosing Paylocity, you can save time for all employees, which they would have spent otherwise on back-and-forth communication.
Employee Recognition and Rewards
Paylocity tracks employee performance and collects feedback on it. It supports integration with employee engagement tools for recognition and rewards programs. This lets you reward deserving employees and publicly recognize their efforts. Activities related to employee recognition boost your team productivity, improve employee engagement, and grow a positive work culture in the office.
Time and Attendance Tracking
Paylocity’s time and attendance tracking features collect accurate data to be used for payroll calculations. Thus, you can pay employees correctly, complying with local labor laws. It saves you from using a separate tool for time tracking and switching between the platforms.
Automated Tax Filing and Compliance
Paylocity automatically calculates and files federal, state, and local payroll taxes, reducing the risk of errors and penalties. Automated tax filing also enables organizations to stay compliant with tax regulations and avoid costly fines.
Centralized Data Management for HR and Payroll
Paylocity is a centralized platform for storing and managing HR and payroll data. This means that you do not need to use multiple tools for these purposes. Thus, Paylocity eliminates the inefficiencies and potential errors related to using separate systems. Since all data comes from the same source, the format is consistent and easily accessible to all of your employees. Thus, Paylocity reduces the risk of data discrepancies or omissions while improving the efficiency of HR and payroll processes.
Paylocity Pricing
Paylocity pricing is not available on its website. However, you can request a demo and get a custom pricing for your company.
Paylocity Support
You can get customer service support from Paylocity by calling client support between Monday and Friday. You may also email your queries to the support team. However, Paylocity does not offer live chat support to its clients or potential customers. Apart from these, you can access the PEAK Knowledge Base to self-serve yourself with help articles and how-to’s.
Who Should Use Paylocity?
I recommend Paylocity to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), including those in education, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, nonprofits, restaurants and hospitality, retail and wholesale, and the technology industry. If you are struggling with limited HR resources, manual payroll processing, complex benefit management, low employee engagement, and changing compliance scenarios, Paylocity will benefit you.
Who Shouldn’t Use Paylocity?
Paylocity is not ideal for businesses with limited HR needs, small budgets, or those seeking simple payroll solutions. I would suggest small businesses with only a few employees and basic HR requirements to go for other applications.
Paylocity Integration
As a payroll software, Paylocity comes with integration options with third-party tools. For that, visit its marketplace and choose from a large collection of accounting, background check, learning management, productivity, recruiting, recognition, time tracking, and tax credit applications. It also offers developer-friendly APIs that you can use to get data flow into their system.
Paylocity Competitors and Comparison
Ripping, ADP and BambooHR are close competitors of Paylocity. I have created a comparison table of their core HR features, global payroll facility, recruitment features, integrations, suitability for business types etc., to help you decide the best one for your use case.
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Secure storage of employee data, full positional visibility, task automation, reporting, benefits | Recruiting, onboarding, scheduling and attendance, learning, performance, headcount | Hiring, onboarding, HR compliance, benefit administration | ATS, onboarding offboarding, Performance management, employee community, workflows, and approvals | |
Operates in 100+ countries, garnishment, taxation | Global benefits, custom policies | Worldwide payroll data visibility | Not Available | |
Employee attendance, time off, scheduling, time card | Timecard approval, overtime policies, scheduling shifts | Online scheduling, time-off approval, time tracking | Automated time tracking and attendance, overtime tracking | |
Talent assessment template, 360-degree feedback | Assign and track goals, performance trend report, review cycle configuration | Annual review, continuous feedback, performance analytics | 360-degree feedback, custom questions | |
Headcount planning, ATS, candidate screening, LMS, offboarding | Onboarding, offboarding, headcount | Career sites, pre-employment screening, recruitment training | ATS, onboarding, offboarding, eSignature | |
Expense management, corporate cards, Accounts payable automation | Expense management, corporate cards, bill pay | Not available | Not available | |
390+ Applications | 600+ Applications | APIs and third-party applications | 125+ applications | |
Small and medium businesses | Growth-focused, tech-driven companies | Enterprises | Medium to large companies | |
Custom | Per employee, per month | Multiple plans | Two subscription plans with a free trial | |
Highly scalable | Highly scalable | Highly scalable | Moderately Scalable | |
Call and Email | Chat and Email | Phone and Live Chat | Chat, Email and Phone | |
Geekflare’s editorial team determines ratings based on factors such as key features, ease of use, pricing, and customer support to help you choose the right business software. | ||||
Paylocity Verdict
Paylocity is an efficient payroll and HR solution ideal for small and medium-sized businesses operating in the United States. Paylocity receives the Geekflare Innovation Award for its extensive payroll suite, which includes time and attendance tracking, benefits administration, and employee onboarding that enables companies to manage their HR operations effortlessly. Though it does not have the extensive global capabilities of ADP, Paylocity is a great alternative to ADP for businesses with basic HR and payroll requirements.
