My experience with Paylocity

Claire Baker
Apr 5
5 min read

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you threw five cats in a bag and asked them to run your payroll?

Or have you already tried Paylocity?

Paylocity is like the dollar store version of a full-stack HRIS.

It has all the parts:

✅ payroll

✅ time and labor

✅ applicant tracking system

✅ ben admin

✅ performance

✅ learning management

✅ expense management

... all with the feeling that the wheels could fall off at any moment.

It’s cheap. And that’s about all you can say for it.

But you get what you pay for.

Here’s my experience working with Paylocity:

🤦 Team

I heard about Paylocity’s turnover before I ever worked with the product. Survivors described a culture like one of a war-torn country.

The coworker that sat next to you yesterday was gone today.

Constant restructuring to cover gaps. People being pushed into unfamiliar positions with little training.

Decaying infrastructure that leaves everyone to fend for themselves and make it up as they go along.

On the customer side, this manifests as

a revolving cast of “dedicated” reps swapped out before they ever get to know your company or its needs,

inconsistent and contradictory instructions,

how-could-this-even-happen type mistakes,

and despair.

🦨 Product

Finding your way through a Paylocity setup is like wandering through a desiccated wasteland.

You find signposts for things that really should be there, but are just... gone.

Reports that come up empty.

A half-mad chat bot that chases its own tail, feeding you the same unrelated help center article over and over no matter how many ways you ask the question.

Standard processes that don’t reflect any human law or logic.

Menu paths that read like magical spells... or nonsense.

The process must be equally confusing for those who work at Paylocity, because I’ve seen errors happen that defy all logic and reason.

📈 Reports

They have some whacky permissions setting that prevents some admins from getting at information the standard way, but allows you to get at it through weird back doors.

Example: 

I once needed to find the Quarterly and Year End reports. I went to the dashboard. It was just... empty. No matter how I filtered, nothing came up. 

But when I went to the Year End dashboard (different from Quarterly and Year End) > Finals and searched by year, there they were.

Another time I needed to run a report of all active and terminated employees since 2019 with their home addresses. I couldn’t do it. No matter what I did, I couldn’t conjure the report I needed. This was probably another permissions issue that the Paylocity rep just couldn’t figure out. So they told me they would need to run the report for me.

Another time, I needed to run a report of the total gross pay by payday for the past 14 months. 

I spent hours on it.

I spoke to two support people. They told me that there was no report that would show the total gross pay for a single payroll. Like I was the first person to ever ask. 

The client was actually the one who found it for me. And boy did I feel like a dingbat when she showed me the way. See, you had to go through the standard reports, search for the exact right term, change the filters, change the export format to .xls, tweak a few filters, group by pay period, 
and voilà.

🪠 Support

Dealing with support is like dealing with the Cheshire Cat.

“By the by, what became of your quarterly tax correction?” asked the cat. “It turned into a pig,” you say. “I thought it would,” said the Support Cat, “when I saw it.”

Where most bad support teams seem to have an unhelpful script and rigid procedures that guide them when to escalate, Paylocity reps seem to be thrown into the ring with no structure or training.

Whether it’s a boxing ring or circus ring depends on what kind of day you’re having.

They can escalate some tickets to the subject matter experts, but these experts are completely isolated from the customer themselves. The specialist teams must be just as overwhelmed and under-resourced as the support team, because most questions get thrown back after a few days with nonanswers like “compliance” or simply restating your question as a statement.

Meaning that you’re at the mercy of the undertrained support rep who happens to pull your ticket.

You’re reliant on them to know when to escalate and who to escalate to. And when the answer comes back, it must be translated through their perspective and superstitions about “compliance.”

They offer chat, phone, and email support, but give you limited ability to follow up on any of them.

After following up on a recent question about email notifications, I was astonished to find that there was a dashboard in the Customer Hub that showed my open tickets. Despite having super admin status, the dashboard had been hidden from me for months, only to be revealed when we tried to reroute where the invoice notifications were going.

Before that, if I wanted to follow up on a previous ticket, I had to sift through dozens of threads, all to service@paylocity.com, and grouped by subject. Since many of the emails had generic titles, many of the threads were shuffled like a deck of cards.

💀 UX

The product is laid out with about as much logic as grandma’s attic. Everything lives in two places, but only one of them works.

Views that are only 2-3 clicks away on most platforms are hidden 13 clicks deep though sidebars, menus, and hyperlinks, half of which are dead ends.

As an example, to find your state tax settings, the Help Docs recommend you click through:

HR & Payroll (left menu)

Configuration (top ribbon menu)

Client Setup (not “Client Taxes” right below it, which takes you directly there like the fake wall in Labyrinth)

Find the card that says “Taxes” in tiny letters

Find the itty bitty link at the bottom that says “View All”

Then click through the various jurisdictions to find what you’re looking for

And can you enter your EINs or tax codes yourself? NoooooOOOOOOooo! You have to email them the document and just trust that they’ll put it in right.

And that the ticket won’t be lost.

And that’s if there’s a document that supports what you need at all.

How are you supposed to find a document for something that never existed in the first place?

🪅 Compliance

As I mentioned before, at Paylocity, “Compliance” isn’t a set of governing principles. It’s a boogeyman they use to scare you.

They will make you jump through hoops to prove that you’re exempt from rules that your company doesn’t meet the minimum requirements for.

And god help you if you need to show them that they messed up. You’ll be stuck in a “Who’s on first?” type conversation for the rest of your life.

🔇 Communications

Are there any flags, badges, or flashing alerts to let you know that there’s a problem?

Nope.

For example, if you’re missing a state tax ID, they’ll only let you know with a spammy-looking email that is

20% branding at the top

2-3 chunky paragraphs of threats and other nonsense. The word “compliance” will appear in every sentence.

One single line that you have to scroll down to see with a list of the missing tax codes.

They appear as NMSUI, WALI, CTPFL. Don’t know what they are? F*** you. Figure it out yourself, because our support team can’t help you.

Struggling to make sense of your payroll provider? Maybe we can help.

Get in touch