Zenefits sent us an email on Friday which seems to have attracted no attention.<p><i>When you originally set up Zenefits, you created an Zenefits admin user in your ADP RUN payroll account to let Zenefits manage your payroll—set up new employees, manage deductions, remove departing employees—on your behalf.<p>Yesterday, without your permission, ADP systematically deactivated these accounts—accounts that you set up, in your payroll system, to allow Zenefits to work on your behalf. The reason for this is that ADP believes it can one day build software to compete with Zenefits, and in the meantime they would like to do anything they can to impede Zenefits.<p>ADP is claiming that they are taking this action for "security" reasons—but this is clearly not true. For years, ADP has let customers add third parties—a bookkeeper or an accounting firm, for example—to their payroll system to manage payroll on a company's behalf. What Zenefits does is no different. In fact, even today, ADP will let you add a third-party administrator to your payroll system unless they have a Zenefits.com email address.</i><p>To avoid the Intuit upsell quagmire, we're hoping to switch to ZenPayroll for Q3. But the Zenefits automatic quote builder doesn't seem to know that ZenPayroll is nationwide now, so down the support rabbit hole I go. Payroll sucks.
I understand why ADP does this -- they are horrible to work with so people are willing to stick someone like Zenefits in between.<p>My horrible ADP story: years ago, ADP debited the IRS taxes twice -- so all the paychecks bounced, or would have if the bank hadn't called me and let me move money into the payroll account from the main account (yes kids, don't let your payroll, or anyone, deduct money directly from your company's main account). It was a couple of hundred K.<p>Customer service was completely uninterested. Finally I got it escalated to the manager of the local ADP office. He said he couldn't understand why I was upset -- the IRS would just credit us the amount next month. He also couldn't understand why I kept saying that they had taken the money out without authorization: "we didn't take your money -- we sent it to the IRS. We don't have your money so it makes no sense to give it back to you. I actually have no mechanism to put money _into_ a customer account anyway." Finally I got annoyed and agreed with him: "you're right, I shouldn't say you 'took' it, I should use the correct term: 'felony grand theft.' And if I don't have the money in my account by the 4pm I will discuss this with the Santa Clara Sheriff."<p>Magically, the company that had "no mechanism to put money into a customer account" managed to put $250K into our payroll account by the time the fed wire closed. Who would have guessed?<p>That's the last payroll I ran with ADP.
I just went digging around the zenefits.com and pulled this verbiage out, which i think outlines the fundamental business problem:<p>'Zenefits works with all top payroll providers, so there's no need to switch from your favorite system.'<p>ADP doesn't want to be a 'provider' in the 'Payroll As A Service' sense. Further Zenefits entry point into the market is based on the low friction of you not needing to leave your current payroll system...<p>why on earth would ADP let this continue?
ADP online access is awful. They make up a username for you, some combination of first initial, last name @ company name. Then the login isn't a modern system, it's the old "authentication required" browser pop up, which disables any user remembering or password managers. Such a pain to deal with!
ADP has some of the worst online offerings. In order to see my paystub or signup for health coverage I use one site. To request time off I have to use a different ADP site. Both have different usernames and passwords.<p>Both sites look like they were made in the IE 5/6 web development drought. I have no real complaints though with how everything actually works though, never had an incorrect paycheck or messed up PTO.
I hope I never have to use ADP, but that said, their response makes Zenefits sound like a bunch of crybaby Valleyholes.<p><a href="http://www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-and-Zenefits.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-an...</a>
Here is ADP's response to this brouhaha.<p><a href="http://www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-and-Zenefits.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-an...</a><p>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 I was back at an automotive startup, we had to write an integration with ADP's DMS. I can say without a doubt that it was the worst API I have ever had the misfortune of working with. Horribly buggy, the documentation didn't match the output, endpoints disappeared at random, different endpoints required different auth keys. Made no sense at all.<p>I even remember a time when our ADP representative called us and said she thought the project should be called off due to the amount of malformed payloads we were sending her.... on our development account. Not production.. Not even testing. Development.<p>ADP has left a bitter taste in my mouth since then.
This is basically because Zenefits and ADP indirectly compete.<p>ADP, Paychex and some other major payroll providers make quite a bit of money be using their relationships with companies to sell insurance and other benefits to their customers. Zenefits is basically an insurance broker, and therefore competing with ADP on this front (which is a lot of revenue for both companies).<p>Payroll really shouldn't suck, the basics of it should be pretty easy. The problem is that the vast majority of payroll providers are nearly impossible to work with.<p>Disclosure: I work at Employii, a company that makes payroll/hr software designed for integration with insurance brokers.
Reading all these comments about how ADP is the worst for any of its online tools (and in my experience, it really is), could someone enlighten me as to why so many companies use them? Is there no alternative?
Blocking any kind of automatic access not explicitly provided for (via an official API, often paid) is quickly becoming a business norm on the modern web, so this doesn't surprise me too much.
When I started working at the startup I'm at, we were using Zenefits and Expensify. For some inexplicable reason, in the last few months everything got switched to ADP and Concur, both of which offer a worse experience than what we were using.
If ADP doesn't want to work with a competing third party that is their right. This is why you should never base a business on the goodwill of a platform. We saw the same shenanigans all the time in social and mobile gaming.
Yes, Zenefits seems to be a nice wrapper around other services with bad UI/UX.<p>That being said, we researched using Zenefits for our 401k, and they work with Ubiquity. Ubiquity has a very nice front end we saw no reason to have a Zenefits account just to access Ubiquity.
I'm biased since I work there, but it's worth checking out justworks.com - payroll/benefits/HR/everything in one place, no need to integrate with different providers.
I'm very surprised ADP would even open themselves up like this to a competitor. The mythical ADP API has been hovering around for years. It feels like ADP just "fixed the glitch" in "Office Space" terms.<p>Anyone going with an ADP competitor is going to have to get fully off ADP. This is a big risk for companies. ADP knows this and the overhead around compliance and other back-end work is massive. Any company trying to innovate in the HR space has the security blanket of ADP to combat.<p>For those that take the risk on companies like Zen* or *Zen need to weigh it. ADP has already had to open-up a bit and improve systems over the last few years to go mobile and improve UI enough to not make it totally horrible. But, it typically comes down to compliance vs. innovation and ADP is the former. If ADP did "fix the glitch" here, it reaffirms the risk and peril of innovation when you still are dancing with the 800lb gorilla. HR folks don't want the headache of that dance and that is why ADP usually wins unless you can totally lap them.
Why bother with ADP when there are so many other payroll solutions. The better option for startups with better things to do than manage HR and operations, is to use a PEO like TriNet and not even bother with any of this. Focus on your core business and outsource everything else.
I once had COBRA benefits administered by ADP and they everything they could to boot me off, and once they did they made a mockery of the appeals process (this was before the day of the Affordable Care Act when getting health care could be impossible otherwise).
CFO - Current user of zenefits & ADP here<p>I authorized Zenefits to look into our data. ADP's feelings on how Zenefits looks and grabs that data are moot (also, how would they know if they are unsecure).<p>This is not an "unauthorized_ integration" because I specifically signed Parker Conrad to be my broker of record.<p>I understand where ADP is coming from (they tried to sell us PEO a month ago, at at crazy high price) because they can't compete on price or product. So they compete on access.<p>However, they messed with our Zenefits Sync without my permission, so now I will simply replace ADP with Zenpayroll or Wagepoint, or the one people seem to be throwing around here "justworks".<p>I will take my $13,000 in payroll fees somewhere else.
I see both sides of this. It sounds like Zenefits was scraping the HTML interface of ADP's web site, and according to ADP's response, generating huge volumes of traffic. Around here, there is a bias that startup = white knight and incumbent = arrogant and malicious. If it was me, I would have probably disabled these accounts too under my ToS against negatively impacting the system for other users.<p>I also see that Zenefits needs to move quickly. Is there an ADP API they could be using?
The Zenefits CEO said ADP was like Dirty Harry. He should say that, because Clint Eastwood was dirty, but he only killed the "punks." I came up with a better movie analogy: Paddington Bear: <a href="https://www.blogmutt.com/blog/zenefits-adp" rel="nofollow">https://www.blogmutt.com/blog/zenefits-adp</a>
I'm COO of a Startup CFO Firm, Kruze Consulting. We work with 135 startups. We use Zenefits heavily in our practice and we've signed Zenefits' petition and are working with Management to spread the word. If your startup is caught up in this, call my cell 415-652-6380, and I'll help you switch payroll providers.
one reason i didn't sign up for zenefits (other than the sales guy was a pushy dickhead) was that they weren't able to clearly articulate how they would integrate with our payroll (a large american bank).<p>i knew in the end it would be me, typing shit from one browser window to another, and i knew it would break often.<p>zenefits sounds great on paper but i'm still unconvinced it's that much better than just doing things by hand <i>for small companies</i> like ours.
Boycott ADP. This is mainstream big corporation and their payroll system is from 80s with ugly UI. Noone even can't login with this old stinking technology.<p>Support Zenefits.
I sometimes wonder if PayPal is doing this with FreshBooks. FB integration is fine with lots of providers; for whatever reason PayPal is constantly down.
I have to put the blame on Zenefits here. You cannot offer something to a customer that depends on integration with a competitor. Shame on you. No I don't support ADP and am not a fan but basic business dictates that you should not even offer this service if it depends on integration with a competitor.
CFO - Current user of zenefits & ADP here<p>I authorized Zenefits to look into our data. ADP's feelings on how Zenefits looks and grabs that data are moot (also, how would they know if they are unsecure).<p>This is not an "unauthorized_ integration" because I specifically signed Parker Conrad to be my broker of record.<p>I understand where ADP is coming from (they tried to sell us PEO a month ago, at at crazy high price) because they can't compete on price or product. So they compete on access.<p>However, they messed with our Zenefits Sync without my permission, so now I will simply replace ADP with Zenpayroll or Wagepoint, or the one people seem to be throwing around here "justworks".<p>I will take my $13,000 in payroll fees somewhere else.