ADP Workforce Now

ADP Workforce Now® is software for midsized businesses with 50 to 999 employees. This SaaS (Software as a Service) product is designed to help you grow your business by automating routine tasks and providing analytic tools to better manage company human resources. ADP describes the product as a Complete Human Capital Management (HCM) solution, rather than simply some form of HR tool.

According to Gartner®, human capital management includes not just the HR functions of workforce acquisition and management, but workforce optimization as well. ADP Workforce Now helps with all three of these functions. It automates routine tasks, freeing you for higher level work. And it gives you a variety of analytic tools to help you monitor and optimize the performance of your workforce.

But there is more to the ADP Workforce Now service than the software. Customers can get strong human support too. This takes the form of assistance from ADP’s own team of experts. They can answer your questions on complex topics like compliance with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and other continually-changing government rules and regulations. You can even contract to have ADP staff handle the administration of certain functions through optional ADP Workforce Now Comprehensive Services.

We’ll go into more detail on each of these later, but for now, here are some of the benefits of using ADP Workforce Now:

• Easier payroll and tax filing. The service helps you reduce administrative work and mistakes with the service’s real-time payroll calculations. If you need help, or just want to talk to someone for additional peace of mind, you have access to ADP’s team of specialized experts.
• It transforms Human Resources from an administrative function to a strategic asset with powerful tools like the Global HR System of Record and customized record keeping.
• Modern time and attendance tracking. ADP Workforce Now automates time tracking and reporting, while giving employees self-service access. Compatible with the latest systems such as biometric timeclocks and Internet-enabled devices.
• Improved benefits management. The service automates common benefits management processes while giving you tools to monitor crucial factors like COBRA and ACA compliance.

With benefits like these, you might think that ADP Workforce Now is a huge, complex system that is overkill for your needs. In reality, the service is divided up into several basic components. This allows you to choose only the capabilities your company needs.

The basic components of ADP Workforce Now are:

• Payroll and Tax
• HR Management
• Time and Labor
• Benefits and ACA

Each of these components come with a core set of features. Each one also has a set of related add-on features, allowing you to adapt the service to the unique needs of your company.

Beyond the add-on features of each component, the company offers ADP Workforce Now Comprehensive Services. These are meant to give you more support and guidance than is normally included with each component. In effect, when you choose one of these comprehensive services, you are contracting with ADP to provide custom administrative support of business advice to your company.

Now that you have the big picture view of the ADP Workforce Now service, let’s look at each component in more detail, starting with Payroll and Tax.

Payroll and Tax

ADP Workforce Now’s Payroll and Tax component handles all aspects of your payroll, as well as computing and filing related taxes. It can manage everything from pay grids, to reports, to all your key payroll functions. And because it is a web-based SaaS solution, you can access it from anywhere there’s an Internet connection, using desktop computers, laptops, or mobile devices.

Payroll provides a single dashboard that gives you access to all your important employee and payroll data in one place. From here you can view reports on all aspects of your payroll and tax system. You can also use the Dashboard to modify employee information and make any other necessary changes easily. Beyond that, you can preview payroll results and view summary and exception data to ensure accuracy.

The core services included in the Payroll and Tax component of ADP Workforce Now include:

• Payroll Processing. Complete payroll processing with unlimited real-time gross to net calculations you can use to preview results before submitting them.
• Payroll Tax Filing Service. The service will calculate and electronically file federal, state, and local taxes.
• New Hire Reporting. Information is automatically sent to the relevant government agencies whenever a new hire comes on board.
• Online Pay Statements. Employees can view their current and past pay statements online.
• Online Standard Reports. The service automatically generates reports you can use to review and assess your organization’s payroll.
• Wage Garnishment Processing Service. Let Payroll and Tax handle court-ordered garnishments as well as keep track of legislative changes affecting wage garnishment.

Add-Ons for Payroll and Tax

Beyond the core features listed above, ADP Workforce Now Payroll and Tax users can opt in to a variety of add-ons that bring additional functionality to the service. These include:

• Time Off with Microsoft Outlook® Integration. With this, Payroll and Tax can update staff’s Outlook calendars to show who is in the office and who is out.
• Paid Time Off Accrual Management. Uses your organization’s unique policies to compute and track employee paid time off.
• General Ledger Solution. Lets the Payroll and Tax service communicate with your corporate accounting system, integrating the two for smooth data transfers.
• Employee Self-Service. This allows employees to view and update their financial (direct deposit, tax status) and personal (change of address and so on) information themselves.
• Mobile Application. This makes possible remote reporting, management and approval of employee time entries.

ADP Workforce Now Comprehensive Services for Payroll and Tax Users

Would you like support beyond that provided in the core services and add-ons? As a Payroll and Tax user, you can contract with ADP to have them provide payroll administrative support to your company.

HR Management

The HR Management component of ADP Workforce Now allows you to streamline and simplify HR management in your company. With the routine chores taken care of by the service, you will have the resources to focus on higher-level functions of Human Resources. Transform your HR department from an administrative function into a strategic resource helping the company grow and prosper.

Hiring becomes faster and more efficient with this service. Much of the routine work is automated, saving you from repetitive manual tasks that waste time and lead to mistakes. HR Management can fill in much of the information in offer letters for you, eliminating potential mistakes at this critical point in the hiring process. And you can create custom checklists to ensure that processes unique to your business (equipment checkouts or security briefings, for example) get handled properly every time.

Managing Human Resources through the Employee Life Cycle

Getting employees onboard is one type of human resources challenge. Managing their human resource needs through their entire career at your company is a different type of challenge. If you are an HR manager in the United States or Canada, ADP Workforce Now can help you keep on top of this aspect of your job too.

New laws, as well as changes to existing laws and regulations can cause major resource problems in your organization. You need to get crucial information to and from both your employees and the government, and you need to do it fast. The HR Management component of ADP Workforce Now gives you visibility into key HR data and aides you in improved employee record keeping. At the same time, the standard reports generated by HR Management help you to comply with complex laws covering compensation, employment opportunities, and occupational safety.

International HR Management

Is your company international in scope? If so, you know the challenges of managing human resources based in multiple countries. To help you deal with these challenges, ADP created their Global HR System of Records (an optional add-on to the basic HR Management component of ADP Workforce Now).

While this add-on is not available in every country, where it is, it provides onboarding processes that are customized for that country. From ensuring data is entered only once across the company, to gathering only information appropriate to the employee’s country, to reducing international administrative paperwork, this system simplifies international HR management.

Like the rest of components in ADP Workforce Now, HR Management is a web-based service that consists of core services, add-ons, and additional comprehensive services ADP can provide. The core services of HR Management include:

• Basic HR Record Keeping. The service can track all your key employee information, including emergency contact info, company property assigned to each employee, and any general notes for each employee.
• Standard Compliance Reports. The service generates the HR-related reports required by government regulators (statutory reports). The list includes, FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act), EEO-1 (Equal Employment Opportunity), Vets-100, Vets-100A, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), I-9, and Disability accomodations reports.
• Customized Record-Keeping. You can create custom fields reflecting your company’s unique HR needs. Track specialized information about employees, employment issues, dependents, and beneficiaries.

Add-Ons for HR Management

Expand the functionality of the HR Management service with optional add-ons like:

• Global HR System of Record. This implements a standard HR system to manage all your employees worldwide.
• Multi-Currency Tracking. You may want to use this if your HR system handles transaction and expense tracking in multiple currencies.
• Country-Specific Customized Record-Keeping. This add-on creates custom fields for tracking the compliance needs of each individual country where you have employees.
• Recruiting. This allows you to create a custom careers site. With it, you can post jobs and assess and select candidates.
• Performance. This enables you to track and assess the quantitative and qualitative performance of company employees.
• Compensation. This add-on helps you to allocate employee compensation and merit increases. It takes into account your budget and business goals to get the best results.

ADP Workforce Now Comprehensive Services for HR Management Users

Would like support beyond that provided in the core services and add-ons? As a HR Management user, you can contract with ADP to have them become your company’s business advisor for talent and HR.

Time and Labor

In today’s complicated business world, keeping track of employee hours and attendance can be difficult. When you have staff deployed at remote facilities or client sites, it can be hard to get visibility even such basic information as whether or not they arrive on time. ADP Workforce Now’s Time and Labor component is designed to help you deal with this kind of problem.

Collection of punch-in and punch-out data is easy with Time and Labor. The service integrate with a wide variety of time and data collection systems. From badge-swipe systems, to web-based timesheets, to biometrics, Time and Labor can collect data directly. This not only reduces manual data-entry costs, but eliminates that source of potential errors.

The service comes with basic work and pay rules built in, or you can use an add-on to create custom rules. The result is that your company’s policies are automatically applied and employee time can be calculated instantly. The service can flag timecard exceptions and send out timely notifications to head off issues immediately.

Time and Labor helps with scheduling coverage and controlling labor costs. Do you have sufficient coverage for peak hours? Do you have any ACA “hours of service” issues? Are your overtime costs withing budget? Included views and reports let you see hours for an individual or entire team so you can manage them accordingly.

To help you keep on top of all this information, the service provides dashboards for reviewing and managing overtime, productivity, absences and other important parameters. With them, you can watch for time and attendance trends and issues to minimize their impact on the company.

You should be aware that ADP Workforce Now actually offers two versions here: Essential Time and Enhanced Time. Essential provides the basics, while Enhanced gives you additional features. Printable Fact Sheets on the website detail the differences between the two.

Here are the core features of Time and Labor:

• Flexible Time/Data Collection. Time and Labor adapts to your time and data collection system. It works with biometric or touchscreen timeclocks, IVR systems, as well as web-based and mobile options.
• Time and Attendance Tracking. Time and Labor can apply basic work and pay rules to your employees. It can also manage individual or group schedules and timecards.
• Mobile Employee Self-Service. Employees have access to their time and schedule information from any Internet-connected mobile device.
• Standard Reports and Analytics. You get dashboards for managing all the key Time and Labor parameters, including overtime, productivity, absences, costs, and more.

Add-Ons for Time and Labor

You may want to add one or more of these add-ons to the core Time and Labor features:

• Custom Reports. Consider this if you want the ability to create custom reports that reflect your company’s unique needs.
• Support for Work and Pay Rules. Use this to create custom work and pay rules for your company. Useful for work situations such as overtime, meal breaks, and shift differentials.
• Labor Scheduling and Management. This add-on takes into account things like employees approaching ACA limits. It also helps you optimize employee scheduling and overtime. Tracks shift sign-up and swapping.
• Absence Management. Keeps track of attendance infractions and can manage leave cases. It can also issue warning letters to employees that are attendance problems.

ADP Workforce Now Comprehensive Services for Time and Labor Users

As a Time and Labor user, you can contract with ADP to have them administer your time-tracking system.

Benefits and ACA

Employee benefits are an important tool for employee recruiting and retention. But administering them and complying with all the tax and regulatory burdens related to benefits can be costly and time-consuming. Now with the new regulations for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), you have a new set of regulations to comply with and landmines to avoid.

The Benefits and ACA component of ADP Workforce Now is designed to help you deal with these issues through automation and tools for easier monitoring. Benefits and ACA can help you cut down on unnecessary benefit and premium payments, as well as reduce your workload for administering the plan and communicating with employees about it. It helps you deal with your tax and regulatory burden in several ways, including the generation of HIPAA certificates and warning you of COBRA trigger events.

Note that the Benefits and ACA component of ADP Workforce Now comes in two versions: Essential and Enhanced. The Enhanced version contains everything in the Essential version, plus features such as:

• Employee Self-Service for Open Enrollment & Life Events
• Invoice Auditing
• The option to purchase Carrier Connections

Complying with the Affordable Care Act

The arrival of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) places a major new burden on Benefits departments. ADP Workforce Now includes basic ACA functionality in the core of Benefits and ACA. They also created a significantly more powerful add-on called Essential ACA.

With Essential ACA, you have access to ADP experts who can help you understand how the ACA applies to your company. It also helps you ensure that you meet the Act’s current and future eligibility and affordability guidelines.

Benefits and ACA provides the following core features:

• Benefits Plan Creation Wizard. Set up a company benefit plan with automatic information collection.
• COBRA Notifications. Receive automatic notifications of COBRA trigger events.
• Workflow Integration. Create a customized workflow for routing benefits documents and approvals.
• ACA Compliance Dashboard. This dashboard provides information on ACA (also known as HCR) compliance.

Add-Ons for Benefits and ACA

You can enhance the performance of this component of ADP Workforce Now with these optional add-ons:

• Essential ACA. This add-on and its dashboards greatly expand the ability of the service to deal with Affordable Care Act complexities. Use it to determine eligibility and affordability parameters, as well as for annual reporting.
• Open Enrollment Employee Self-Service. Let Benefits and ACA handle employee enrollments and beneficiary updates for you.
• Invoice Auditing. This add-on reconciles benefit invoices and bills for you.
• Automated File Sharing with Carriers. This gives you the option to set up an automated file feed from ADP Workforce Now to your company’s benefits carriers.

ADP Workforce Now Comprehensive Services for Benefits and ACA

As a Benefits and ACA user, you can contract with ADP to have them provide benefits administrative support for your company. Some of the options here are Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) Administration, Commuter Benefits Administration, and COBRA Administration.

Compare Options

The Compare Options menu option on the ADP Workforce Now website takes you to the page below. It is a place where you can see the key components of ADP Workforce Now, side-by-side. In addition, you can see the add-ons and comprehensive services.

This page can serve as a quick summary of the overall service. It is also a good place to look if you are unclear where a particular capability resides within the overall ADP Workforce Now structure.

Who’s Using It

This title is a little misleading for this portion of the ADP Workforce Now website. It isn’t a list of clients who use this service as you might expect. Instead, what you find here are effectively miniature video case studies. They provide examples of how other midsized business are using aspects of the service in the real world. At the time of this review, there were three of these case studies on the page.

One addresses how a rapidly-growing company kept their focus on their core competencies. They chose the ADP Workforce Now Comprehensive Service for HR, rather than expanding their HR department to deal with company growth and ever-changing government regulations.

Another case study explains how ADP Comprehensive Services help a specialist children’s hospital meet all the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. With ADP taking the lead on the ACA, the staff at the hospital can continue to focus on caring for the children.

The third case study discusses how ADP is helping the Kansas City Royals baseball team deal with the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The team had apparently relied on an in-house solution which wasn’t sufficient to deal with the new law. ADP stepped in to help the team meet the new rules.

Conclusion

The ADP Workforce Now service is a Human Capital Management solution that should fill the needs of many midsized businesses. It allows you to choose only the components you need for your business, helping you to control costs. At the same time, it offers a variety of add-on services that allow you to customize their solution to better fit the exact needs of your business. For situations where this is not enough, Comprehensive Services are available that let you offload various functions to ADP experts, freeing your staff to work on other priorities and core competencies.

The fact that ADP Workforce Now is delivered through the SaaS (Software as a Service) model offers you many advantages. You don’t need to purchase a server farm to run the software, nor build out an IT department to manage and maintain that hardware. Your staff can access the service using standard PCs and Internet-connected mobile devices, saving you the expense and headaches of specialized hardware.

This service is not backed by some startup or a small, struggling firm. ADP is a multi-billion dollar corporation that has been in business for decades. And ADP Workforce Now isn’t a new or small service. In 2011, the service surpassed the 10,000 customer mark.

So the question becomes, is ADP Workforce Now the solution your midsized business needs? This review should have given you a reasonable idea whether it is or not. At this point you have two options.

The first option is to do some additional research. Throughout the ADP Workforce Now website you will find short videos of actual clients describing how their business is using some aspect of the service. I found these to be very helpful in getting a better understanding of the benefits the service provides. Reviewing each of these videos could help you to make a decision.

In addition to the videos, ADP has provided downloadable Fact Sheets to give you better insight into each component of the service. These too were useful in gaining a better understanding of the service. They present the topics in a more narrative form that I found easier to absorb.

That said, if you are looking at the ADP Workforce Now HR Management component, or the Time and Labor component, take care. There are two Fact Sheets for each of these components, and it is not totally clear how they are related. In this case you might want to go right to the second option.

The second option is to talk to someone at ADP about the ADP Workforce Now components you are interested in. You can go to the Get Quote page and fill out the form there to have someone contact you. You can also call the sales department, or use the Click to chat link to get further information before formally requesting a quote. Whichever you choose to do, you can do it on the Get Quote page.

Read more about ADP Workforce Now on DiscoverCloud or our knowledge base.