Paychex Flex

Phone wait is no less than 1/2 hour - no employees - supervisors are not responding to calls for help - Headquarters is not taking calls - customer service is not managed well at all.

Extremely happy with overall use

We've been on Paychex PREVIEW payroll software for 16 years. It was a solid no non-sense payroll processing work horse which came with everything you'd ever need to process payroll for 100+ employees in a very quick and efficient manner. PREVIEW software was extremely well designed and well thought out. The developers took the perspective of payroll processing users and provided all the navigation speed, functionalities and reports that we'd ever find useful or need to do our jobs quickly and efficiently. There were hardly any unnecessary clicks, keystrokes or scrolling to speak of. It exceeded my expectation all these years. Paychex's golden era and reputation as payroll processing leader was probably due to these sensible legacy products.

Like all good things which must come to an end, we were switched to FLEX Q2 of 2016 because PREVIEW was so old that Paychex decided to sun set it this year - which was totally understandable. But any reasonable PREVIEW clients would also expect and assume that whatever good features, good functionalities and useful reports that were available and had been working well in PREVIEW would be brought over and be available in the new payroll product as well. Not so.

Enters FLEX which Paychex touted as being technologically advanced, etc. It probably is. But as far as FLEX payroll processing features and functionalities are concerned, I am actually set back 16 years to a payroll processing product that seemed Beta, very slow, cumbersome, awkward - compared to PREVIEW. Paychex simply threw PREVIEW out the window and started fresh from scratch with FLEX. I spent my first several months on FLEX Payroll sending them suggestions to make FLEX "better". I don't know if anyone cared.

FLEX Payroll screen designs and navigation are very slow, very cumbersome, and very awkward. What I considered "speed features" in PREVIEW were non-existent in FLEX. Fields are spread out as far apart as they can find room to spread them out to (instead of keeping the screen layouts compact) seemingly so as to "maximize" unnecessary clicks, scrolls and keystrokes as much as possible. It's also more cumbersome and time consuming just to get information and reports from FLEX Payroll which could be run quickly and easily before in PREVIEW. I felt like I'm using payroll software designed by inexperienced college graduates who had never processed payroll before in their lives. They're out to get as much of my time make me do as much work as possible for the same amount of work that I have to do as before - to see where my breaking point is.

So overall, I'm not impressed. To me, if the basic payroll processing functionalities are less than before, FLEX Payroll will still be inadequate despite all other "great features and modules" they added to FLEX which I don't need.

Overall, I had a great experience with Paychex Flex. It was easy to set up and use, and customer service was always available to help with any questions I had.