Paychex Sucks

I am a current payroll specialist with Paychex. I am not sure who you deal with but obviously you needed to change reps. I personally provide 100% customer service satisfaction and have an A plus rating for my service and skills. I apologize for your disatisfaction but it is not the company that you should refer to. You should refer to the branch & individual that you have dealt with. It is the employers responsibity to provide us with social security numbers for their employers, and I do everything in my power to relay that to my clients. If the employer does not have the ssn, then I will not add to payroll because they, the employer can be fined if they do not have the appropriate documents on file. As far as the 401K subject, I have no idea what you are referring to and the reports are perfect if you know how to read.

LOL At Anonymous. 718-323-3000 is my office number. Anyone who wants to hear how bad Paychex fu**ed over my business the last 9 weeks, give me a call.

Anonymous's attitude is exactly what's wrong with Paychex. They think everything is running smoothly so nothing ever gets better. I don't think they updated their reporting since they started and it really needs improvement. Why am I not able to get a custom reports yet? Why do I have to use your crappy predefined reports? What if I want to know how much I paid to John Doe #1 for January 12-March 31?

And you don't know about 401(k)? Sadly, that doesn't really surprise me.

As an EX employee of this company I can tell you that everything you have written here is right on the money. This company sucks. They under-hire and make lowly payroll specialists with virtually NO training do the job that 4 people should be doing. The managers of the company get bigger bonuses when they fire people and keep their staff down. The 100 best places to work thing every year is a total scam as they hand pick who they are going to send the survey too. Stay away from this place at all costs.

NOT one of the "Best 100 Places to Work". Look HERE: http://eyeonpaychex.blogspot.com

I'm not an account specialist,but I do want to say one thing I do see what they go through to get important information such as social security numbers and many times the employer does not want to be bothered or gets annoyed at the constant phone calls their reps make in regard to this information. They do what they can except come to the company and tell you "give me the information now". Paychex is like any other company where they there are rules and guidelines to insure protecting the company AND client. Before making judgements I think you should look at your own job and deny there are any flaws with it.

I agree with Paychex employee they do their best and theirs just no way to make everyone happy. If you dont like their prices then go elsewhere, its a free country. And it is the employers information to make sure the employee information is correct. Your rep tells you to please check your employees information for errors such as mispelled names or addresses, etc. All information is MANUALLY type in by PEOPLE not a computer so there is room for human error. No one is perfect.

Ok "Paychex employee"...I'm a CPA so when I prepare payroll reports I look and make sure I completed the forms accurately and completely. If anything is missing I would call the client and ask them for the information. I then pass the reports to my partner who also checks them to make sure I didn't miss anything and then we send them to the client to sign and review themselves. We would never release reports with missing REQUIRED information, that would make us look stupid. I'm not sure why Paychex wouldn't do the same. The client is paying to have payroll reports completed in a professional manner. Would a Paychex employee at least try to leave a promising comment? It seems like your all happy with the sub par performance and are not motivated enough to institute any change.

P.S. It's easy to agree with yourself as I see the last two comments came from the same ip address.

We have a small business of 6. Since the beginning there has been issues. One week I called in a 40 hour week for someone and the check came in with 40 hours regular and 40 hours overtime. As you can imagine the check was HUGE. We had to pay to have a rush check sent for our employee and to void out that one. Of course it was OUR fault and not our reps. We just had another issue where checks should have been dated early due to a holiday. We paid for rush delivery. They came on time with the wrong date. They cannot do anything about it and we are responsible for writing our own checks to replace them. Or just use the checks with the Friday date. Even though they admitted it was their fault and they just "don't know what happened". I have a lot of patience as I deal with customers in my company..I know how frustrating it can be. I allow room for human error, miscommunication etc. However, when its over and over small and big mistakes its a little sad. We have now canceled our services.

Horrible experience, I used paychex for my payroll for along time and being a new small business i just wanted to make sure things were done right so i did not get stuck owing taxes. But the fees were so high so i ended the service. This was the best thing i ever did i now use Quick Books it is way cheaper i input the hours in and the take the taxes out and send them in. Now as far as 401 k they are horrible i was told i would have my check in 10-12 business days its been over a month. No one know what is going on everytime i call in someone tells me something different. This is horrible !!! Expecially at christmas in the month of december they were taking out fees of 35.00 unaurthorize caused me huge problems now i cant even end my 401 k for a big company they have major issues!

Paychex business practices are generating lawsuits. Check out http://eyeonpaychex.blogspot.com

First-Paychex does not "fail" in providing SSN on required returns. Paychex is not required to get the SSN of clients employees, it is the employer's responsibility. The employer is at fault if they cannot provide Paychex with a SSN of an employee they have hired. Second-Paychex can export and customize reports. Third-any client can get a report that details how much an employee made for a certain time period. Fourth-Paychex is rated among the best for training its employees and for places to work.

Once Paychex is hired by a client to complete payroll reports it becomes their responsibility to complete the reports fully and correctly. How hard is that to understand, Really? Being a great place to work has nothing to say about the service being offered.

Worst service. They didn;t do anything and just printed 3 checks and federal tax forms. They charged whopping $28 per week and $130 for end of year forms. They didn;t submit forms to any agency. Just print and I mail payments and forms myself. No epay setup. Ridiculous service. They didn't even submit correct forms and when I received a notice to file right forms, I called and they say I don;t have tax service on my payroll. Paying these much money for 3 employee payroll is outrageous. I use intuit for 9.95 month 6 free months to try and everything setup with epay and clear emails for every task on payroll.

Beware of what they are doing when they have access to your bank account. They went into mine and took money that was suuposed to be for taxes and kept it. They say they have a contract that allows them to do this, but they cannot produce it. This company has caused me nothing but serious problems. They completely messed up my FSA, they have screwed up my taxes. They are not at all concerned with complying with laws. When you call with a problem there is no one who will work to solve it for you. I am sure this Paychex will be out of business within the next few years. Just don't let them ruin your business.

I am reading over the new contract. I see that on page 21 (the last page, of course) there is the following clause..." Paychex shall, under no circumstances, be liable for any special, indirect, incidental, or consequential damages which Client may incur as a result of Paychex' breach of the Agreement..." Clause 22 says, "Client shall indemnify, defend, and hold Paychex harmless from any and all claims, actions, liabilities, losses, EFT reissuance charges, costs, attorneys' fees (including in-house counsel fees)..." In short, Client is responsible AND liable for everything, while Paychex is responsible for reporting but NOT liable for ANYTHING including any mistakes on the part of Paychex. Hmmmm???

Paychex has somewhere between five and six hundred thousand payroll clients. OBVIOUSLY there are going to be some unsatisfied customers. As a culture, however, Paychex is not half as bad as other fortune 500 and 1000 companies that are out there.
TJ, I would be very interested in speaking with you because you were definitely set up incorrectly on the 401(k) product. The "Mid Atlantic Trustee" service is an outside company that charges anywhere between $600 - $900 per year. This is completely optional for clients and is NOT a good idea for startup plans, since it can only be charged to the plan assets. The reason it seemed like a 20% asset charge is because your total plan assets were probably pretty low. Diamond Jim, are you a lawyer? That seemed like a pretty loose interpretation of the Paychex agreement. WS, I'm sorry if there was an error with regards to your bank account, but making the statement that Paychex will be out of business in a few years... completely unfounded and shows how little you know about the company. Hopefully Paychex can read these message boards and improve in the areas that are consistantly letting their clients down, since there are obviously areas that can be improved. With that said, I can sincerely say that the majority of Paychex clients are completely happy with the payroll services. There are bad sales reps, and bad service reps in every organization. I am sincerely sorry to anyone who fell victim to one or both. Aside from that, there are also unreasonable clients and business owners with ridiculous expecations. To those people, I sincerely wish your next service provider lots of luck as they will most certainly need it!

Re: Realist

Thank you very much for taking your time to reply. I assume you are an employee of Paychex. It's nice to hear from someone who knows what they are talking about. Is the 401(k) being set up wrong the fault of me or my employer? I do have low contributions but no matter what those fees are outrageous. If you want to send me an email you can reach me at tj855-at-tjshome.com .

It's nothing you did wrong. It is a service that helps reduce the liability of the business owner. Unfortunately, the company Paychex contracts with (Mid Atlantic Trust Company), will only take their fees out of the plan assets. This usually doesn't make sense for your employer to do until the plan has more than $50 or $100 thousand dollars in it since it will take it out pro-rata. If you are putting away more than any other employee, and the plan itself doesn't have very much in assets, you will pay the majority of it. Bring it to your employers attention. They might consider removing the service until the plan gets more assets in it. This would mean that the employer would sign as the plan trustee instead of Mid Atlantic Trust Company.

Also, MATC (Mid Atlantic Trust Company) charges about $850 per year out of total plan assets. For that to equal 20% of your 401(k), I'm guessing this was the first year your firms plan has been in place and the total assets are less than $5,000?