ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadBoth 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.
TL;DR Have your front end talk to multiple backends-
There's no benefit to multiple accounts unless the more important one is used much more rarely.
Sigh.
Complete it old Java Requirements and everything...
I think this is one of many reasons smaller companies are chipping away at these behemoths because the companies themselves (ahem, SAP) can't even keep it all straight.
But since the intent of the action is clearly to cut off the competition, why would we assume they will stop at "just" email address? That's their first sortie in what could become a long war. Next it could be IP address, then they could subtly alter their API to break automated access (and give out a different API to trusted insiders), and so on.
Ultimately when it comes to web-scraping and unauthorised usage, the advantage is always with the home team. They have the ability to change things any time they want, and the user is always caught behind every change (and they could literally change things once a day).
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.
Ultimately Zenefits is in this situation because they are more or less a UI or Orchestrator of other services that do the 'real' work. ADP was just tired of letting a middle man eat off of them.
Zenefits wasn't a competitor to ADP, but it seems that ADP thinks that they may want to roll out a product that competes with Zenefits, so now they are trying to clear the playing field before they step onto it.
This would be similar to Apple deciding to screw up some 3rd party apps that run on OSX because they are working on a product that competes (but has not been announced or released yet). (And then you coming along claiming that said 3rd party software was a 'competitor' to Apple, so should just 'suck it up').
I like how you specified "on OSX" because this is exactly what Apple has done multiple times on iOS. Remember Maps?
This model was well-established long before Zenefits hit the scene.
By your account, Walmart should manufacture all the items it sells, etc.
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.
Or is this issue just offloaded to the customers?
It also wouldn't work on Firefox due to an error in the way that they were checking the current browser model, IIRC. (This was eventually fixed though)
ADP still messed up the PTO carry over hours - I think it took them 2 weeks for fix.
Our accounting department switched all of us to logging our hours using ADP EZ-labour a year ago. Since then, they've had to assign a full-time-nag who emails everyone, hounding them to do their timecards at the end of the month. She angrily admonishes everyone, telling them how at her last workplace, "everyone just did their timecard at the end of every day!" The UI is just so awful, so unforgiving of mistakes, so tedious and repetitive, that no one wants to use it.
We used them for a year and a half and they fucked up every time we added or removed an employee and everything I heard was that Paychex was just as bad.
We had employees in CA and NYC which meant ZenPayroll wasn't on the table for a while and then we switched all our HR to Trinet so it never made sense to make the switch to Zen Payroll.
I worked there about 20 years ago. Once they actually messed up, and needed to recall, all of our employee paychecks.
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.
ADP has left a bitter taste in my mouth since then.
New companies like Justworks don't build on top of other systems but have built everything in house. You don't need to coordinate with payroll providers, or health insurance brokers, or even government agencies (to do your W2s, I9s, 1099s, etc) - because they literally do it all for you.
On top of that, their software doesn't look like crap and their support staff is actually, you know, supportive. Oh, and they're not "Free" like Zenefits- but they save you so much on healthcare you end up spending less than you would on "Free" software that doesn't work.
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.
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.
'Zenefits works with all top payroll providers, so there's no need to switch from your favorite system.'
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...
why on earth would ADP let this continue?
Disintermediation typically refers to "cutting out the middleman", not introducing additional middlemen.
Cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation
Banks, along with selling their own products, act as middlemen to sell other types of product (e.g. insurance). The only disintermediation I can think of in relation to retail banks, is the move for people to buy things like insurance from (i) web sites, who may kick back some of the commission that would otherwise go to the bank, or (ii) insurers who sell direct through their own channels.
What you describe is intermediation or reintermediation: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reintermediation.asp
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9499906
it's a running theme in most customer service interactions with Zenefits (Aetna's fault, Intuit's fault, etc.). There's also tends to be long delays in response times because of the back and forth between Zenefits and the provider, and sometimes conflicting responses which make things really frustrating
1) If you're choosing a payroll provider, Zenefits integration may help you choose ADP because you have a non-awful user experience with Zenefits as a front-end.
2) It could run afoul of antitrust law for tying, monopolizing, or the essential facilities doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Skiing_Co._v._Aspen_Highl...), if the case could be made that ADP has sufficient market power.
i knew in the end it would be me, typing shit from one browser window to another, and i knew it would break often.
zenefits sounds great on paper but i'm still unconvinced it's that much better than just doing things by hand for small companies like ours.
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).
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.
Disclosure: I work at Employii, a company that makes payroll/hr software designed for integration with insurance brokers.
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.