UltiPro

UltiPro® is Ultimate Software’s cloud-based, all-in-one HRM/HCM solution. It unites all aspects of HR, payroll, and HR talent management to ensure that your organization maximizes the business results it gets from its investment in people. Thousands of companies rely on UltiPro for their people-management tools and solutions.

To help you determine if UltiPro is the right SaaS Human Capital Management solution for you, I’ve summarized the various solutions and services available within the overall UltiPro framework. UltiPro offers a wide range of features that interact with each other, making it difficult to draw clear lines between the different elements of the overall product.

The organization I’ve selected for this review is not the only way to look at the product, but it will give you a good overall sense of what UltiPro can do for you. Let’s start with their HR capabilities.

HR

Managing the human resources in your organization is a top priority for the best business results. UltiPro provides a comprehensive HRMS/HRIS solution that powers this process from recruitment, through onboarding to career development and succession planning. The UltiPro portal is the focal point for all this activity.

As the central point for HR activity throughout your organization, the portal is the ideal place to post important company information. It is also the place where employees can check information like their time off requests, performance reviews, and the lastest pay information.

As a manager, you have access to all the human resources information you need, such as:

• Performance reviews
• Compensation and benefits information
• Talent management tools are results

This solution is compliant with HR-related regulations in more than 30 countries. In the U.S., this includes COBRA, FLSA, HIPAA, EEO and other such requirements. In Canada, this includes compliance with the Canada Labour Code, PPACA, and more. As part of your Global System of Record, you get a unified view of your entire worldwide work force.

Payroll Administration and Benefits Administration

Payroll is a major function of every organization, but one that is often neglected. UltiPro’s Payroll Administration solution makes this into a fast, efficient process. It can perform hundreds of different payroll-related calculations for both the U.S. and Canada. Whether you need to compute shift premiums, piece worker payments, average pay rates (for use in overtime calculations), wage garnishments, or similar complex calculations, UltiPro can handle it for you.

The UltiPro Payroll Gateway makes all your payroll information available in one place. Whatever you need to do to get your payroll processed quickly and efficiently, you can do it here. This includes:

• Processing only specific pay groups
• Setting up payroll checks
• Reviewing payroll before submission
• Combining payroll steps to simplify your payroll process
• Retrieving time and attendance data
• Calculating pay and gross-to-net
• Generating direct deposit information and files
• Issuing off-cycle checks
• Voiding payments
• Computing retroactive pay
• Tracking the processing of your payroll through UltiPro
• Integrating with global payroll service providers to handle payroll for non-US employees

The UltiPro Benefits Administration solution provides a way to manage all employee benefits easily and efficiently. The benefits portal gives you the ability to set up and administer your plans right from your desktop or mobile device and allows employees to check their benefit options and coverage the same way.

Because UltiPro’s payroll and benefits solutions are integrated, premiums and deductions get calculated automatically. You don’t need to waste staff time doing duplicate data entry or reconciling those entries with UltiPro. This solution will compute eligibility and participation in all plans, including compliance with the Affordable Care Act. Likewise, the benefits administration solution will compute wage accumulation and withholdings for tax purposes.

UltiPro ACA Toolkit

This is the basic ACA service UltiPro provides to all their customers. It gives you a Healthcare Eligibility Dashboard that lets you monitor and manage your organizations compliance with the Affordable Care Act Employer Mandate. It comes with pre-defined compliance reports to help you in your monitoring.

In addition, the toolkit:

• Can generate all lines of the 1094-C and 1095-C forms
• Obtain and track employee electronic consent
• Track ACA Measurement, Administrative, and Stability periods

Talent Management

Managing your staff to provide the most personal development while at the same time maximizing their usefulness to the organization is a balancing act. UltiPro provides solutions that help you find this balance for each individual employee.

Starting with the recruiting process, through onboarding, career development, and performance management to succession management, UltiPro provides tools that make talent management easier and more effective.

Recruiting

Recruiting quality talent is one of the keys to organizational success. Without a solid process, your organization can lose out in the competition for the best talent without anyone even realizing it. According to Ultimate Software, in the typical job application process “40% of candidates who start an application don’t finish the process.” The UltiPro Recruiting solution is Ultimate Software’s answer to the challenge of recruiting the best possible talent.

To improve your success in recruiting today’s technically savvy employees, UltiPro Recruiting takes a candidate-centric, technology-based approach. It creates an engaging and personalized experience for each potential employee. The solution works on mobile devices and interacts with familiar social tools, making it not only easy to use, but something that potential employees want to use.

This solution makes it easy for candidates to search for job openings. They can also use the Discover Your Potential tool to find suitable opportunities within your organization. The candidate provides information on their education, strengths and so on, and the tool turns up the best options for them.

UltiPro Recruiting can instantly import a candidate’s LinkedIn profile. This saves the candidate from having to enter information that is already readily available online. Candidates can also share job opening with other people using Twitter. To help engage candidates, the solution gives you the ability to post dynamic content, such as videos that display your organizational culture.

To achieve better fits between candidates and positions, the solution allows candidates to add more information than is traditionally found in the application process. They can specify their behavioral traits, motivations, and aspirations, characteristics that are highly important for long-term success in various positions.

UltiPro Recruiting incorporates gathering candidate references into itself. This allows the potential employee to more easily provide this information during the application process. In addition, by connecting these references into your recruiting process, it introduces them to your organization, providing an additional source of potential candidates.

This solution also:

• Makes it easy to post new jobs to LinkedIn and other services
• Includes automatic translation of job postings to specified languages
• Includes online candidate assessment interviews for candidates that make it past the initial screening
• Optionally launches pre-hire background checks on potential employees

Onboarding

The onboarding process can greatly influence a new employee’s impressions of their new organization. The UltiPro Onboarding solution aims to reduce the stress and hassles of the onboarding process, both for new hires and for your current staff.

The onboarding portal, which is accessible from any computer or mobile device, is the access point for the process. With it, you can ease a person’s transition into your organization using features such as:

• The ability to complete, review, and digitally sign all required onboarding documents (tax forms, eligibility forms, etc.)
• Personalized welcome messages
• Dynamic content like company information videos
• A checklist of all the tasks the new employee must complete so everyone knows where they are in the process
• Instant internal connections to co-workers they are already connected to through LinkedIn
• The ability to assign a company mentor to each new employee
• An optional personal goal for each employee

Career Development

The UltiPro Career Development solution allows you to track and manage the professional growth of your employees. It helps you to identify the skills, knowledge, and qualifications your people will need for future advancement. Through a web interface that employees can access, this solution makes it easy for your staff to take more responsibility for their own career development.

Managers can use this same interface to monitor the progress of their people and plan for future staff development needs.

Performance Management

The UltiPro Performance Management solution helps you create a pay-for-performance environment in your organization. Using continuous feedback and performance assessments, this solution helps you to understand the competencies of your employees, as well as areas where they are weak. This information not only helps you develop these employees, but helps you plan for future workforce needs.

UltiPro Performance Management helps you increase both your business results and employee retention. Features of this solution includes:

• Allowing management and staff to create competency-based employee development plans
• The identification of high-performance individuals
• Employee performance assessment using measurable objectives
• Automatic collection of multi-contributor input for 360° feedback

Succession Management

Succession management is all about ensuring that the loss of a key employee doesn’t bring down the whole organization. UltiPro Succession Management is a solution to this problem. With it, you can build a talent pipeline that reduces your succession risks. Use this solution to:

• Aid employees in achieving their career goals with personal development plans
• Assess their performance toward these goals
• Guide employees to develop in ways that benefit themselves and the company
• Identify retention risks as well has high-performance individuals
• Analyze and report on employee’s strengths and opportunities for improvement

Open Enrollment and Life Events

Open enrollment time can be a big burden on your staff. UltiPro Open Enrollment greatly reduces this burden by automating the process through a web portal. Instead of filling out tedious paper forms that someone must then transcribe, new employees can complete the process online. This reduces errors, stress, and even protects the environment by eliminating all those printed forms. UltiPro Open Enrollment makes it easy for employees to understand their benefits options and to keep track of where they are in the process.

Your Benefits Administrators can easily configure the open enrollment options. This includes custom content and messaging for employees. In addition, they can add contingencies to the process to prevent errors. For example, the system can automatically prevent an employee from signing up for a Health Savings Account if they have not already selected a high-deductible insurance plan.

The open enrollment process also benefits from the fact that UltiPro is an integrated, comprehensive solution. Employee selections during the open enrollment process automatically flow to other parts of UltiPro. This means that deductions for selected employee benefits automatically flow into payroll as the proper deductions.

Life events like births, deaths, and marriages of course require changes in employee benefits. UltiPro Life Events is a simple solution to this problem. It leads employees through the process of updating their records to reflect life changes. The solution is designed to eliminate paperwork from this process and allow the employee to complete all changes without any assistance from HR personnel.

Time, Attendance, and Scheduling

UltiPro Time and Attendance is a powerful solution for all your time, attendance, and scheduling needs. Designed for large enterprise organizations, it offers a range of capabilities, including:

• Capturing employee time with a variety of devices
• Creating accurate schedules
• Reducing payroll expenditures
• Alerts and notifications for issues like employee coverage gaps and labor law violations
• Reporting on absences, wages costs and similar metrics
• Analyzing overtime and other factors
• Managing leave time

The solution also provides a comprehensive portal for time entry, leave tracking and related activities.

Tax Management

Simply keeping up with the ever-changing rules of thousands of U.S. and Canadian tax authorities is a massive undertaking. UltiPro reduces that burden by delivering all U.S. federal, state, and local tax updates to you automatically ever quarter.

They do the same for Canadian federal, provincial, and territorial tax updates. This solution helps you with multi-state taxing rules, reciprocity, taxation wage accumulation, and withholding requirements to ensure your organization’s compliance with all applicable tax rules.

Smart Tax Search is part of the Tax Management solution. In the U.S., it automatically determines the correct federal, state, and local payroll tax for each employee based on where they live and work. In Canada, the tool recommends the appropriate federal, provincial, and territorial taxes.

Strategic Tools and Other Resources

Beyond the solutions we’ve discussed so far, UltiPro offers strategic tools and other resources. These include:

• A Global HCM solution
• Reporting, Workforce Analytics, and Business Intelligence
• Customer Stories
• The Resources and Events Page

Global HCM

Multinational organizations have unique needs. Your organization needs one Global System of Record to manage everything. Employees need the ability to interact with this system in a culturally sensitive manner. UltiPro’s Global HCM solution is designed to address these needs.

UltiPro can serve as your Global System of Record for all activities in the organization. It gives you an accurate, global view of your workforce, including employment contracts and agreement details. It also allows you to provide standard processes and experiences to all your employees, while ensuring compliance in each country where you have employees.

To address the localized needs of your employees, the system can localize information based on the country each employee lists in their settings. This allows the system to display dates, times, and currencies in local unit. In addition, the system supports numerous languages and country-specific localizations.

The system can integrate easily with the payroll service provider of your choice, or you can use Ultimate Software’s preferred provider, Celergo. Should you use their provider, you can take advantage of their pre-built payroll connector to exchange HR, Payroll, and other compensation data.

Reporting, Workforce Analytics, and Business Intelligence

Because UltiPro is a unified system combining all your people management functions, you gain powerful capabilities. By pulling together data from all your HCM components, UltiPro gives you the ability to turn this raw data into useful analyses and business intelligence.

As a manager or executive, you get access to a range of report, query, and analysis tools. Among the capabilities you gain are:

• Dashboards displaying critical information
• Workforce metrics like turnover trends and the cost of benefits
• Pre-built common reports covering headcount, recruiting results, average salaries, and more
• Automatic alerts for issues such as impending performance reviews

You also get access to a set of Predictive Analytics tools. These include the:

• UltiPro Retention Predictor. This makes a forecast of how likely an employee is to remain with the organization over the next 12 months.
• UltiPro High Performance Indicator. This spots your top performers for you.
• UltiPro High Performance Predictor. This one tells you how like it is that an employee will become a high performer.

Customer Stories

Getting a solid understanding of a system as large and complex as UltiPro can be difficult. The Customer Stories page on the Ultimate Software website provides nearly 100 stories. These are broken down by Industry and Topic, and let you read how other organizations have used UltiPro in real-world situations.

The Resources and Events Pages

These pages on the Ultimate Software website may be the ultimate tools for understanding the overall UltiPro service. There are more useful types of information on these pages than I can easily describe. A partial list of what you will find on these pages includes:

• Whitepapers
• Webcasts
• Course material
• HR thought leadership videos
• Infographics
• HR Workshops
• Seminars
• and more

UltiPro Services

UltiPro customers have access to a range of services in addition to the technology solutions they acquire. While Ultimate Software provides several specialized services (we’ll discuss those in a moment), all customers benefit from their Partners for Life philosophy. Under Partners for Life, all customers are entitled to the following:

• The New Customer Success program designed to help new customers transition from implementation to a fully-operational state
• 24/7 support with a dedicated Account Manager
• Complementary training and educational material
• Optional on-demand live training and self-paced learning
• Online user community and collaboration tools

Beyond those benefits included in Partners for Life, you can engage Ultimate for the following additional services.

UltiPro Managed Services

If your organization qualifies as Mid-market or Enterprise level, you may find this solution very useful. You can outsource the management of functions such as HR, Payroll, and Benefits to staff from Ultimate.

You form a partnership with Ultimate based on your organization’s unique needs, customizing both the structure of the partnership and the exact services you want Ultimate to provide. Benefits that Ultimate claims your organization will gain by using this service include:

• Quick access to best practices and UltiPro staff
• Reduced risk due to employee turnover
• A scalable support model
• Reduced operations and processing expenses

What kinds of work can you get done through an UltiPro Managed Services partnership? Here are a few of the possibilities:

• HR and Payroll Administration
• Recruiting
• Training and Learning Management
• Solution Activation and Ongoing Supports
• Consulting and Recommendations for Best Practices

UltiPro ACA Employer Services

Complying with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a big job for organizations in the United States. Ultimate is a certified and IRS-approved transmitter of ACA compliance documents. They offer two options for offloading ACA work to them: ACA Distribution Services, and ACA Management Services. They provide the following:

ACA Distribution Services. This service will print and distribute required forms to your employees. It can also file your 1094-C and 1095-C forms with the IRS. They will also validate and clean your data.

ACA Management Services. This service provides additional ACA support. It includes everything in ACA Distribution Services. In addition, Ultimate’s experts will monitor and manage communication with the Healthcare Exchanges and the IRS.

UltiPro Payment Services

UltiPro provides two different forms of payment, Tax Filing, and Wage Attachment Disbursement. Here’s a breakdown of each:

Tax Filing. Let UltiPro’s tax professionals take responsibility for ensuring that your tax filings and payments are correct and on time. Let them deal with the more than 13,000 U.S. Tax Agencies and free your people to do more productive work.

Wage Attachment Disbursement. Does your organization needs to process child support, tax levies, creditor garnishments and similar third-party payments on behalf or your employees? Let UltiPro handle this for you. Using information that is already in UltiPro, they can generate and disburse the appropriate payments for you. It’s another resource-burning task you can let someone else do so your people can concentrate on other things.

W-2 Print Services

Ultimate offers UltiPro customers a service that can print, seal, and ship year-end tax forms for you. These include W-2s for the United States, and T4s for Canada. You can have these forms shipped to your facilities for distribution to employees. Alternately, you can have the forms mailed directly to your employees, saving your staff time and effort.

UltiPro Check Printing

If you are using UltiPro to process your payroll, you can take advantage of this service to get your employee’s checks printed without burning internal resources on this task. You can configure UltiPro’s Payroll solution to designate which employees need printed checks.

This service can print and deliver those checks to you with a 48-hour turn-around time. The service uses check stock with features like microline borders, endorsement lines, and watermarks to increase their security.

Conclusion

As you’ve seen here, Ultimate Software’s UltiPro is truly a comprehensive solution for managing the people in your organization. A mobile-friendly SaaS solution that provides unlimited training at no additional cost and assigns each client organization a dedicated training representative, it is no surprise that UltiPro powers the HCM functions of thousands of organizations.

At the same time, UltiPro is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Certain solutions within the overall product are better suited for mid-sized organizations, while others are enterprise-scale. The ability to choose between these specific elements of UltiPro allows you to craft the overall solution that best suits your organization.

So is UltiPro the solution for your organization? I’ve given you a broad overview of what Ultimate Software’s product can do for you, but you will want more information than this before making a final choice. I suggest that your next step is a visit to the Ultimate Software website.

More specifically, I suggest you visit the Customer Success Stories page. Spending some time reviewing how other organizations in your industry have used UltiPro should give you a deeper understanding of how all this power can be harnessed to help your organization succeed.

Another useful resource is the HCM Buyer’s Kit page. Here you’ll find tools like an HCM Solution Buyer’s Checklist and a Cost Savings Calculator that will help you estimate the savings your organization could gain from deploying UltiPro as compared to the industry average for HCM solutions.

If there is a specific aspect of the overall UltiPro solution that you are particularly curious about, you can browse the relevant section of the Ultimate Software website. Many pages include short video tours that highlight key benefits.

All these activities will provide you with a better understanding of this sprawling cloud-based Human Capital Management solution. But at the end of the day, you are going to need to talk to someone at Ultimate Software, either to clarify certain details, or to get a detailed personal tour of the product. You can do this by clicking the Contact link at the top of any page on the Ultimate Software website. Or if you are ready to take this next step now, simply click here.

Read more about UltiPro on DiscoverCloud or our knowledge base.