We’ve worked with a ton of software solutions for all kinds of business needs. If you need a payroll and HR solution that works well with both SMBs and enterprise businesses, we consider Paychex to be a decent option, especially if you also need business insurance management tools. If there’s one thing to say about Paychex from the beginning, is that it goes beyond just offering the essentials as far as payroll, HR, and benefits are concerned.
Compare Paychex to The Best Online Payroll Services
We know, there are a lot of payroll solutions out there. So choosing the right one for your business can easily make your head spin. In the case of Paychex, while it didn’t make the cut in our list of top picks, it’s still a decent solution for businesses that want to get a handle on their payroll, HR, and business insurance needs. As we looked at the pros and cons of each tool, others stood out more for a variety of different reasons.
For example, a tool like Gusto brings together HR, payroll, benefits, time tracking, and more as a full-service solution that’s a great fit for most SMBs. Also, it’s one of the most accessible and easy to use. But don’t take our word for it here. Make sure to see all of our top picks for a deeper dive.
Paychex: The Good and The Bad
The Good
Improves your hiring processes: Paychex enables your employee screening and background check process while also collecting and centralizing all the data it gathers from the point of receiving a resume to the interview process and beyond. Any time you have questions about improving your processes, you can get in touch with its fleet of HR representatives for professional advice.
Includes employee onboarding solutions: Paychex makes sure you improve the employee onboarding process by equipping you with easy-to-complete online forms. It also lets you create personalized messaging, automate the paperwork collection process, and even add videos to the process for greater customization.
Offers professional employer organization capabilities: A professional employer organization, or PEO, is a service provider feature that connects you to a trained HR professional to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your health benefits packages, that you’re refining your onboarding process, and that you’re handling retirement planning correctly. As a PEO, Paychex assigns you a dedicated HR professional that offers solutions so you can better manage your employees and company growth.
Provides payment processing solutions: Paychex offers a payment processing solution that lets you easily accept credit and debit card payments and lets you send automated emails. Employees can also clock in and out through the POS system for an integrated approach to time tracking.
Automates payroll tax filing: A lot of payroll tax filing tasks can be busywork. Paychex enables you to automate the process of filing state and federal employee payroll taxes without the hassle and extra paperwork. It also ensures you file with fewer errors and penalty fees.
Includes time tracking and attendance: As an essential part of any payroll process, Paychex ensures you have a way to track employee time through its cloud-based time management system. Both employees and managers can access it from anywhere for an easier time tracking process.
Includes HR tools: With Paychex’s HR features you get access to seasoned HR professionals that can answer all your HR-related questions, maintain workplace compliance, and increase productivity.
Manages healthcare and employee benefits: If there’s one thing Paychex does thoroughly, it is its thorough management of all your health benefits—whether that’s group health insurance, a health savings account, individual health insurance, dental and vision, retirement health plans, or tax-saving plans. It even offers a financial wellness program that helps employees ensure their financial futures.
Provides 401(k) and retirement management: Managing 401(k) plans properly can be hard to manage. Paychex helps you navigate the whole process by advising you on the best course of action and makes sure to integrate it with your payroll workflow for one seamless automated process that works in the background for you.
Easily stores all your documents: Paychex takes care of the paperwork problem by ensuring you can sign and store all your documents online in one central location that’s both easy to manage and access anywhere you work from.
Includes business insurance solutions: From worker’s compensation to property and casualty coverage and even umbrella coverage, Paychex’s business insurance tools make sure you’re properly insured and covered. It helps you choose a top-tier insurer for whatever your needs may be, and manages and integrates that insurance into your payroll process.
Provides group health insurance plans: With Paychex, you can offer group health insurance plans to your employees and their families once you talk to one of its experts to help you walk through the process. This way, you can enjoy tax savings and attract higher-quality hires.
Offers solutions for self-employed individuals: Are you self-employed and want a better way to manage your retirement plan and minimize taxes? Paychex can help with that too with its self-employed and sole proprietorship solutions. Administrators can help you establish and create a plan that works well for your specific needs.
Provides free training webinars: Paychex is thoroughly invested in educating its users. It’s why it offers webinars as a way to help employees make more informed decisions. Its webinars cover everything from cash flow, attracting and retaining employees, or even improving productivity.
Offers cyber liability insurance: Specifically looking for cyber liability insurance? Paychex has you covered there too. It helps you shop for the best cyber insurance to ensure you’re protected from cybercrimes at all times. This helps you cover the potential cost of litigation and loss of business.
Uses InVision Iris Time Clocks: Paychex takes the clock-in process to a whole new level with its Iris Time Clocks. Just like it sounds, it scans your iris with its recognition technology for a touchless punching option that can work for up to 50,000 employees. It works with Wi-Fi but is also usable in offline mode. With tools like this, especially for enterprise businesses, Paychex is the gift that keeps on giving.
Offers a Paychex app: Paycheck’s Flex App gives employees access to time and attendance tracking tools as well as work schedules, time cards, or even transfers between jobs or assignments. Its convenience saves your HR team time and ensures you give your employees agency as they have access to self-managing features. Employees can also look up time-off balances and submit pay adjustments.
The Bad
User experience needs improvement: Some of Paychex’s siloed offers don’t meld so well with others, causing a clunkier user experience and occasional system issues. Sometimes, when all-in-one solutions offer too many solutions, it becomes overwhelming fast.
Steeper learning curve: Since Paychex is so varied, there’s a bit more of a learning curve to get through. Though they do offer customer support with seasoned professionals, they aren’t always readily available.
Can be expensive for smaller teams: Though Paychex doesn’t list its prices publicly, due to it being a more varied payroll and employee management solution, it can easily become more expensive for smaller businesses the more employees they have.
Support responsiveness isn’t consistent: Sometimes payroll representatives aren’t as responsive as they could be which can leave you to figure out troubleshooting issues on your own. This, coupled with a steeper learning curve, can lead to a more difficult time onboarding the system.
Paychex Pricing and Options
Unlike other payroll solutions out there, Paychex doesn’t publicly list its pricing options. To find out how much you’d be paying for a team of your size to use all of Paychex’s features you’ll have to get in contact with its sales team to get a free company quote. Once you answer a few questions about your business here, you can get a free quote that’s tailored to your business.
Paychex Partnerships
Besides offering a slew of tools to make sure you have payroll and employee management under control, Psychex also offers professional product partnerships for accounting, banking, financial professionals, franchises, and national associations.
As an accountant, you might want to offer more services that complement your consultations. With Paychex, you can offer complete solutions for hiring, payroll, and HR services. With Paychex Flex, a platform that allows you to manage all your consulting efforts with its tools, you’re able to streamline the services you offer and keep track of your clients.
While there are a lot of perks involved in using Paychex’s tools and systems, it’s not without its shortcomings. When you’re thinking of partnering with a solution that you’re responsible for marketing, it’s always best to know that the system is usable and accessible. And there are other options on the market that also offer the same partnerships that might come with additional upsides or fewer downsides.
How Paychex Ranks
Though Paychex doesn’t make it on our list of top picks, it’s still a viable payroll option for businesses. What’s more, over 600,000 businesses currently use their solutions to manage everything from health benefits to payroll, time tracking, and more. Paychex didn’t make our list of top picks because of the number of cons it presents as compared to other options with more positive reputations and features.
Businesses that are also looking for an integrated POS system, as well as a streamlined way to manage their business insurance, are better fits for a solution like Paychex. However, if you’d like to look at how other options measure up, make sure to see our list of top picks:
- Rippling – Best online payroll service for most
- BambooHR – Best for an employee-first solution
- Deel – Best for automating multiple payroll tasks
- Remofirst – Best for receiving payroll analytics
- TriNet – Best for payroll services for SMBs
- Paycor – Best for payroll compliance
- Gusto – Best user interface for payroll
- QuickBooks – Best for knocking out payroll & accounting in one step
- ADP – Best for avoiding payroll growing pains
- Deluxe Payroll – Best way to attract more talent
- SurePayroll – Best worry-free guarantee for small business taxes
- Payroll4Free.com – Best feature-rich free-forever online payroll service
- Remote.com – Best for global hiring and payroll
Our recommendations in this category, exemplified by Rippling and Gusto, allow companies to address payroll-adjacent HR issues directly in their platform.
This helps you automate everything that comes with payroll, including tax payment, employee payment processing on different pay schedules, and employee health benefits management. Unless you need specific features of Paychex, our other top recommendations will let you handle payroll and HR at a better price, with less complexity.
QuickBooks is another great option for much smaller businesses or solopreneurs who want to get a handle on their payroll and accounting once and for all. QuickBooks is also a super useful tool if you handle a smaller team and are responsible for your yearly tax filings.
If you’re in need of a payroll solution to cover the essentials but don’t quite have the budget to pay for one, consider a payroll tool like Payroll4Free.com. With it, you can pay both employees and contractors, track time off, perform direct deposits or print paychecks, and make tax calculations.
Summary
For business owners, Paychex is definitely a solid solution for all things payroll and HR. And if you’re looking for business insurance management or even a POS system you can integrate with your payroll workflow, then it’s an even better option worth considering.
Still, there are plenty of more expansive and reliable options available on the market. If you’re looking for a solution that comes with all the essentials and executes them well without a steep learning curve, a full-service payroll tool like Rippling or Gusto might be a better choice.
