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ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration

#81

Post by ubercore »

mikeryan wrote: post #69
ohitsdom wrote: post #32

ADP online access is awful. They make up a username for you, some combination of first initial, last name @ company name. Then the login isn't a modern system, it's the old "authentication required" browser pop up, which disables any user remembering or password managers. Such a pain to deal with!

ADP is awful. Period. We used them for a year and a half and they fucked up every time we added or removed an employee and everything I heard was that Paychex was just as bad. We had employees in CA and NYC which meant ZenPayroll wasn't on the table for a while and then we switched all our HR to Trinet so it never made sense to make the switch to Zen Payroll.

My experience with payroll has been that if you have ADP, "I've heard that Paychex is better" and if you have Paychex "I've heard ADP is better" :)

Re: ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration

#83

Post by CWuestefeld »

mikeryan wrote: post #69
ohitsdom wrote: post #32

ADP online access is awful. They make up a username for you, some combination of first initial, last name @ company name. Then the login isn't a modern system, it's the old "authentication required" browser pop up, which disables any user remembering or password managers. Such a pain to deal with!

ADP is awful. Period. We used them for a year and a half and they fucked up every time we added or removed an employee and everything I heard was that Paychex was just as bad. We had employees in CA and NYC which meant ZenPayroll wasn't on the table for a while and then we switched all our HR to Trinet so it never made sense to make the switch to Zen Payroll.

ADP is awful. Period.

I worked there about 20 years ago. Once they actually messed up, and needed to recall, all of our employee paychecks.

Re: ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration

#85

Post by olafskyansian »

jeffasinger wrote: post #75

This is basically because Zenefits and ADP indirectly compete. ADP, Paychex and some other major payroll providers make quite a bit of money be using their relationships with companies to sell insurance and other benefits to their customers. Zenefits is basically an insurance broker, and therefore competing with ADP on this front (which is a lot of revenue for both companies). Payroll really shouldn't suck, the basic…

When you think about where the $$$ is, they DIRECTLY compete.

I think the thing people don't realize is that there is way more money in insurance than there is in payroll, ADP knows this and so does Paychex.

At my last company, I think we paid about $90 per employee per year for payroll processing, W-2s and employee self-service.

A broker commission for health insurance is conservatively 3% of the total annual premium. So with an average family premium (employee and employer) hovering around $17k a year, the commission on that plan would be $500+ dollars, well over five times what you could earn by actually doing payroll. an employee electing single coverage with a total premium around $7k a year is still far and away more valuable than "payroll"

If you look at ADPs earnings transcripts for the past year, you'll see this area is where the growth is at. It's even stronger at Paychex where benefits constitutes basically all of their growth.

Re: ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration

#86

Post by matthewsimon »

markbnj wrote: post #49
apalmer wrote: post #46

I just went digging around the zenefits.com and pulled this verbiage out, which i think outlines the fundamental business problem: 'Zenefits works with all top payroll providers, so there's no need to switch from your favorite system.' ADP doesn't want to be a 'provider' in the 'Payroll As A Service' sense. Further Zenefits entry point into the market is based on the low friction of you not needing to leave your curr…

I see you getting downvoted, but I don't think that's fair. Whether people like it or not this is almost certainly how ADP views the situation. The term "disintermediation" used to be tossed around 10-15 years ago, to describe the process of upstart tech companies getting between older, slower moving companies and their customers. ADP is definitely in the older, slower moving category. Defense is probably the only re…

Sorry to quibble, but I don't think that's what "disintermediation" means.

Disintermediation typically refers to "cutting out the middleman", not introducing additional middlemen.

Cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation

Re: ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration

#87

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

enknamel wrote: post #82

If ADP doesn't want to work with a competing third party that is their right. This is why you should never base a business on the goodwill of a platform. We saw the same shenanigans all the time in social and mobile gaming.

Zenefits isn't relying on goodwill -- they're actually a subcontractor of the customer of ADP, so ADP is actually blocking their own (paying) customers. ADP is saying that they'll delete the logins of customers who use a particular subcontracting firm, because they don't want their customers to use that firm's services.

I think you don't quite understand what the situation is here.

Re: ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration

#88

Post by ne0n »

voska wrote: post #84
calcsam wrote: post #8

Engineer at Zenefits. Can confirm this.

Why not buy up some other domains and setup forwarding to your Zenefits employees. This way ADP can't block you and your customers still get the benefit!

That would be pretty easy to figure out. You can't really keep that one a secret because you have to tell your users to switch it in their accounts. A simple dns lookup will tell you if it's pointing to zenefits.com. And if ADP already knows the accounts that use zenefits, I'm sure they're just going to watch them to find patterns. Even if you bought 10 domains, your customers still have to share them, and ADP still knows who they are. You could probably do that for brand new customers, if you keep the number of people on the same domain to a minimum. Seems like a lot of work to me.

Re: ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration

#90

Post by c22 »

c22 wrote: post #58
voidlogic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a well designed system this kind of segmentation and isolation can be done in a way that is transparent to the user experience. TL;DR Have your front end talk to multiple backends-

Is this using "TLDR" as a synonym for "hint"?

Not being a dick. I'm genuinely curious about the evolving usage of words.
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