ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration

Zenefits sent us an email on Friday which seems to have attracted no attention.

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.

We use ADP and they are one of the worst companies to work with, very very difficult and their web interface is like the 90s.

I'm biased since I work there, but it's worth checking out justworks.com - payroll/benefits/HR/everything in one place, no need to integrate with different providers.

That's what initially sold us on Zenefits, though — it puts a reasonably polished interface on ADP, which is reliable enough for the commodity money transfer service it provides, I guess. Same goes for Aetna — Zenefits puts a nice UI on commodity health insurance. Working with a traditional broker was a nightmare.

ADP has some of the worst online offerings. In order to see my paystub or signup for health coverage I use one site. To request time off I have to use a different ADP site. Both have different usernames and passwords.

Both 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.