Justworks: My experiences
- Claire Baker
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Have a small business with a multi-state team?
Is the person who runs payroll responsible for a gajillionty other things?
Had it up to here with the state tax BS?
Have you talked to Justworks?
Justworks just works.
Whether you’re reading that sentence positively or negatively, you’re right.
I have my complaints about Justworks, but I still think they’re the right solution for small businesses with limited budgets who struggle to keep up with multi-state payroll and labor compliance.
☂️ PEO
A PEO is a service that basically hires your employees on paper and leases them back to you. They take on the compliance responsibilities and you get to keep running your company. It means you don’t have to deal with state tax registrations, managing deductions, or pay close attention to sick time regulations.
But it also means that you have an employment nanny that will micromanage you when you least appreciate it. And it blocks you from certain employee data that you might want access to.
The best thing about Justworks is that it offers a PEO option at an affordable price.
The less awesome thing about Justworks is you get what you pay for.
🤖 Product
Justworks’ system is pretty good if you don’t push it too hard. When it’s in the background, it hums along nicely. When you look under the hood, there are some pieces that don’t quite fit together.
Steps that you think are automated that are actually done by humans. Lovely humans who work fast enough to pass for machines, but can sometimes make mistakes.
There are weird UX things that probably started as tech debt, but now are so ingrained that they feel like personality quirks. Especially reporting.
📊 Reporting
There are weird quirks, especially in reporting.
Example: Dates for reporting are set to UTC (I think... or something), so it can pick up data for days that you don't expect. It leads to some weird-ass gaps.
I once worked on a project that required us to run a weekly PTO report. If people were out for the full week, one thing happened. If they worked at all that week, something else happened.
Except that if you ran the report from Monday - Friday, it wouldn't detect time off requests that started on Monday. You had to run the report from Sunday to Friday to detect full-week vacations.
It was months before we caught it. When we did, the support team said that it was working "as expected."
As WHO expected? Not me, or any first grader who knows their days of the week.
🤝 Interoperability
Justworks pretty much exists in its own universe. It doesn’t really integrate with anything, which is fine sometimes. Not everyone needs their payroll and benefits to work with outside systems.
But when you do need it to cooperate, whoa nelly does it create a lot of work.
Just know that if you bring in your own benefits or outside HR systems, you’re signing up for dual maintenance. Also keep in mind that the Justworks team doesn’t see that very often, so they’ may be a bit slow on the uptake when troubleshooting.
💁♂️ People
The people are absolutely lovely. Every single one of them, without exception. You can tell that they have a great working culture and everyone is treated well. I really appreciate that.
But you can tell the team is trained in the company protocols, not the actual systems they manage.
It shows up in the “because: compliance” answers,
in the support ticket that gets 3 different answers depending on who you ask and how you ask it,
processes that you know could be optimized,
the gaps in the product that you feel like someone should have noticed by now.
You don’t want to get mad because you know these people are doing their best. But why do you have to ask so many damned times for anything to get done?
I appreciate that they haven’t sent any of their work offshore, though.
Not because people overseas can’t do the work, but the delivery is different when someone has lived in the culture and context that they’re managing. Just like you can tell if the chef is from the country whose cuisine he’s cooking.
The US system is weird. We're like 50 different countries, but not. It takes a long time to learn how all those different combinations show up in company culture and employee expectations. It's a lot to ask of someone who hasn't spent a lot of time here.
❤️🩹 Benefits
Justworks’ health plans are more affordable than what most small groups can find on the open market. But dollar-for-dollar, they’re less competitive with other PEO plans.
Justworks plans with similar deductibles and premiums will have a slightly higher cost of care (copays, coinsurance, etc.) than comparable PEO plans. I suspect that this might be where they make up some of their margins for the lower overall cost of the platform.
Justworks also makes it easier to get and manage the less exciting benefits plans like worker’s comp, disability, and life insurance. The plans are basic, but they get the job done.
💅 Class
I can forgive a lot when a company is willing to make an exception when it’s the right thing to do. I’ve seen Justworks be accommodating when they really didn’t have to, even if it took a ton of extra work.
Their representatives sometimes get in over their heads, but they generally get to the right place in the end.
💰 Cost
This is where Justworks wins. They’re more cost-effective than the alternatives and get the job done.
It’s a Pareto Principle thing: 80% of your problems come from 20% of the work. Justworks will do the 80% well, but the 20% will be a little rough. If you can live with that, Justworks is a great option.
If you can’t live with the "shagginess," invest in something like Insperity (for compliance) or Rippling (for technology).
Or, if you want more of the “abusive boyfriend” vibe, you might be a good fit for Trinet. Prefer the softer gaslighting feel of emotional neglect and financial abuse? ADP Total Source is the one for you.
Want an intro to Justworks? I'd love to connect you. I don't have a financial interest in whether you sign up, but my referrals get a discount on their subscription.
You may also want to check out this post comparing Gusto and BambooHR.
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