My opinion: Why I hate ADP most of all

You think my takedown of Deel was harsh? 

There’s a company that I hate more than Deel. A company so bad that I won’t take a client who uses them unless they’re planning to leave. Because I simply cannot take on the liability of how long problem solving takes when I use them.

Everyone who knows me knows I hate

loathe

detest

abhor

despise

am repulsed by

and resent

A D P

“But ADP cuts the checks of 26 million workers in the US. That’s like 70% of all workers!”

No. No it isn’t. 

There are almost 163 million workers in the US. That’s 17% of them. Poor bastards.

And you know why their checks are cut by ADP? 

Because most of them work at big, old companies and switching payroll providers is really, really hard at that size.

And because people don’t know any better. 

ADP is the worst, and here’s why:

🤬 Employment Practices

I want to put this one at the top, because it’s important. The people who work at ADP are dedicated, talented, hard-working, and knowledgeable. If you get a resume from someone who worked at ADP, hire them RIGHT NOW. It’ll be one of the best decisions you ever made. 

ADP is a dinosaur of a product and the only reason it “works” is because there are wonderful, exceptionally trained, and earnest people behind the scenes doing what software should do. 

They take daily abuse from customers and their own employer every day, and keep coming to work to do a damned good job for those ungrateful bastards. 

And ADP pays them like crap and treats them even worse. 

And convinces them that they aren’t worth more.

I once saw a Reddit thread where a current ADP employee was considering two job offers from other payroll providers. 

One was a hot Silicon Valley unicorn offering twice his ADP salary.
The other was a newer, younger startup offering three times his ADP salary.

"I don't know if I should take on the risk of working at a startup..." he kept saying.

Business models aside, both of the alternative companies looked pretty solid. Not career-makers, but excellent stepping stones. 

"How much are you making at ADP," I asked the stranger, "if you don't mind my asking?"

You guys. He was responsible for tens of millions of dollars in payroll every month and he earned less than a manager at Starbucks. 

He'd been there for seven years.

ADP deliberately recruits people from economically suppressed backgrounds because they’re cheap, they work hard, and they’re grateful for the opportunity. 

Veterans, people from working class communities, community college grads in rural areas...

The sorts of people where a four-year degree isn’t an option and they don't have families and friends telling them they deserve better.

I'm glad these people get the opportunity, too. That's not the problem. It's what happens next.

They train them like Marine recruits, break them like horses, and say, “Who could ever love you?” like an abusive boyfriend.

🦕 Product

ADP was probably a revolutionary product in 1996, when software came in boxes. 

It was still probably the best thing out there in 2010, when “the cloud” was an exciting new concept. 

And then they stopped. 

Payroll is an incredibly complex process. Think about all of the layers of SOPs, operations, org structure, software architecture, revenue modeling, and training that go into building a 75-year-old company of 67,000 employees that processes billions of dollars of highly-regulated financial transactions.

And then computers come along and change the whole game.

And then the internet comes along and changes it again.

The only reason this moribund company is still alive is because there are other 50+ year old companies out there and the cost of switching is prohibitive. 

And people believe that stupid line about 17% of paychecks getting cut by ADP. How many were cut by ADP in 2000, folks? Which way is that trajectory going?

Boy oh boy are you (the customer) gonna pay for that tech debt.

User experience isn't the only thing made worse by tech debt.

I once had an employee who didn't have a bank account. Don't ask me why. I didn't ask questions. I just had to figure out how to get a check to KY once a week.

First, ADP sent the check to the HQ in NY. So I called them and told them they needed to cancel the check that went to NY and send a new one to KY.

The poor person I was speaking to tried to help. He voided the one check, ***ISSUED AN ENTIRE DUPLICATE PAY RUN***, and sent checks for every single employee at that location...

...to New York.

Now, the fact that they couldn't figure out a simple thing like where to send a check was a problem. But I've seen that before. 

The bigger problem was that somebody outside of the company had issued an entire payroll without our authorization.

Luckily it was a small restaurant. What if it had been a large team with high salaries? 

What if the employees had cashed the checks?

What's to prevent one of those ADP employees from adding themselves to a mega company's payroll? Who would even notice? Why not do it with half a dozen companies?

Selling a product where a well-meaning person could make that kind of mistake is irresponsible. Taking months of escalations to fix it is unforgivable.

🖕 Interoperability

What interoperability? Sure, they “integrate” with things. But half the time what they’re calling an “integration” is actually just a report that exports as a CSV that you have to manually upload to the other vendor each month. 

That’s not an integration. It’s a report. 

Or you can get them to build you an API. It’ll set you back a minimum of $5,000 and take about 4 months to stand up. But sure. That report will be sent automatically at the end. 

Until it breaks.

💀 UX

Are you old enough to remember what it was like to work in Windows 95? You had to search through a million menus as long as a roll of toilet paper. The options had names that told you nothing about what they did. You had to navigate through a labyrinth of screens, links, ribbons and checkboxes so arcane that you knew you would never find your way back here again. 

That’s what it’s like to use ADP today. 

It's been a while since I ran payroll in Workforce Now and I've mostly blocked it out of my memory. So this probably isn't 100% accurate, but it's true emotionally.

To run payroll, you have to:

• Go to one screen to "open" payroll (Why? Why doesn't the button do this automatically?)

• Then you have to go to a "workbook" to actually do payroll things like add reimbursements or import timecards (Why? Why is this an extra step? Why doesn't it take me here automatically?)

• Let's say you find an error that you need to go to the employee profile to fix. Now you have to shitcan the whole thing and start again. 

• Then it goes into some kind of holding state while you go get whatever approvals you need. If something changes, you have to "reopen the workbook." (Which annoyed me for reasons I can't remember right now.)

• And then, finally, FINALLY, you can pay people.

Even the images look like something out of the pre-9/11 era. Why are there images in your payroll platform anyway?

🛡️ COMPLIANCE

It doesn’t tell you when there’s a problem. It doesn’t tell you when there’s an update. It just expects you to “know.” 

And the data you need to identify errors is spread like an easter egg hunt in the maze of ugly screens and inscrutable menus.

A client in PA recently told me that ADP wouldn't even run her local PA taxes. She would have to handle those herself. Outside of payroll. 

Which is weird, because I remember one particularly painful day when I added a PA local deduction code into Workforce Now and got an error. 

The problem was on the ADP side, so the representative I was talking to had to go do something with "the mainframe." 

As the East Coast payroll deadline approached, I followed up for an update. 

"Do you really need to deduct this tax?" she asked. 

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that," I said. 

As the west coast deadline approached, I followed up again. 

"Okay. Fine. We'll skip the Pennsylvania local this pay cycle. Please! This is blocking me even submitting payroll." 

"Oh, no. We're committed now. You can't withdraw or submit payroll until we're done." 

It took a full seven and a half hours to run payroll that day. All because the PA local tax code had a bug in it. Maybe this was the first Pennsylvania resident ever in its 75-year history to be paid through ADP?

⏳ Support

The people at ADP are wonderful. But the support system is awful. It takes days for them to respond to a written ticket. 

By the time they respond, you’ve forgotten about the whole thing. 

They much, much prefer to talk to you by phone. They will keep you on the phone for HOURS, while they happily work their way through their ancient systems. 

I have had multiple 4+ hour calls with ADP support. Half of them didn't fix anything.

There’s no way to prevent them from directing your support requests to the phone when they want to talk to you. 

They’ll call you when you specifically said, “Please follow up by email.”

They’ll call you when you said, “I don’t pick up my phone, so email is the only way to reach me.”

They’ll call you at 5am your time. 

They’ll call you when you invoke CCPA to tell them that they’re not authorized to call you on the phone number you gave for two-factor authentication only. 

Then they’ll say that they’re not authorized to schedule a specific time for a call in advance.

And then you die.

💸 Cost

They force you to upgrade to a higher subscription plan just to support one capability, and then they charge you thousands of dollars to build a lousy API.

And their invoices are buried so deep in the platform, and are written in such inscrutable code, that you need a PhD to understand what you’re being charged and why.

I once met someone who tried to understand the invoice himself. He'd compared the cost of ADP with another provider and had made a recommendation. The client asked for clarification, so he dug into the invoices.

He wasn't a payroll expert, nor was he particularly good at analysis. But he worked in HR, so he was somewhat familiar with payroll concepts. After noodling on a few months' worth of invoices for hours, he sent it to me. 

"Can you make sense of this?" 

Me: The alternative was $15,000 per year and you said ADP was how much?

Him: $30,000

Me: Based on these invoices, it looks more like $45,000.

He looked a little sick.

Me: But if we got rid of all of these missing EIN and correction fees, you could probably get it back down to $30K. That would take months, though.

He should have recommended the other provider.

---

Are you or someone you know in an abusive relationship with ADP? Help is available.

Call our hotline at...

Just kidding. We won't abuse you with nonstop phone calls. Drop us an email.

Get help leaving ADP