Justworks vs. Square Payroll

Overall, Justworks is a great platform to use to manage organization wide payroll, benefits (medical/dental/vision), and other misc. HR related services (401(k), life insurance, AD&D). The value Justworks brings to our organization greatly exceeds its cost, which I find very reasonable. I particularly love its customer service, which is fast, reliable, and helpful (By calling a number, you get connected directly to a customer service rep., no answer machines or need to press multiple buttons/selections to get to where you need). By implementing Justworks for our HR needs in the U.S., it greatly reduces the time I spent on HR administration duties while offering great benefits and HR services to our employees.

Incentivized

I would say that Square Payroll is perfect for companies that don't exceed 100 employees. The multistate payroll system allows for us to be able to handle business with ease when we go do work in Mississippi or Arkansas. The multiple payout options are great for our particular business. We might deal with a multimillion dollar contract one day and a $120 order the next.

Incentivized

• The JustWorks platform is extremely user-friendly. Everything is built in with a seamless user experience. 9 times out of 10, if my employees are looking for something, it is right in front of them.
• JustWorks has amazing customer service. Every member of their team is equipped to answer any questions you may have. This is super helpful when you have an immediate need and can't get a hold of your Account Manager. They can look up your account, answer questions and relay the information to your Account Manager providing seamless communication.
• JustWorks did an outstanding job walking my employees through their initial set up process. While hesitant about switching insurance carries, our Account Manager was able to answer every question we had with transparency. They even made suggestions about rolling over deductibles that had already been met and gave important information about current healthcare providers being in network.

Incentivized

• 1099 contractor payments are easy, and they provide you with the IRS filing as part of the service.
• Direct deposit/debit from your already connected account to the employee.
• Reporting and management features are simple yet inclusive.
• Low cost compared to alternative solutions.

Incentivized

• More HR info in regards to compliance and resources for employees to stay in compliance (they have just started to do this with sexual harassment but more things like this would be great!)
• Better integrations with company holidays and timesheets. They have recently updated PTO to integrate so I'm hoping that company holidays would also be a feature added.

Incentivized

• [In my experience] they can cancel your service at any time, without warning or explanation. When they do this your funds are held by them for up to 90 days, at which time they are presumably accruing interest on your money. This could take a small business under very quickly and there is nothing you can do about it.
• [I believe] getting verified is complex and not customer friendly. Until you are verified you can't talk to payroll customer service, which is paradoxical. Even getting a hold of account services for this purpose is tricky and exceedingly time-consuming, plus they can not answer most questions directly.
• [I feel] they don't communicate well, closed my account with no notice whatsoever. The only notification I had about the need to verify my account was one easily lost email. Not having responded to this email fast enough created months of stress and difficulty in the setup process, only to find in the end I would need to start from scratch to attempt to sign up again.
• [In my experience] if they close your account you can never reopen it. You have to start a new account from scratch.
• [In my experience] they can hold your money and not deposit funds if your account is "under review". This can happen without explanation. No customer service is directly available for this. I was told I had to wait for them to call me.
• [I believe] they are either lying, or the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing to such an extent that they give a great deal of misinformation.

Justworks is a really good platform for payroll and even vendor payments. There are some areas of improvement that Justworks could make in the area of bulk processing, to decrease administrative time as well as reporting. There are no reports we currently use from the Justworks platform as we have not found them useful.

Incentivized

It could use a mobile-friendly interface. Other than that it's a simple layout and non-cluttered which allows you to get done what you need to get done. No unnecessary dodads or distractions.

Incentivized

Justworks offers many different options for customer service. You can contact them via email, phone or Slack. They are quick to resolve issues and if your Account Manager is out of office, they have other Managers covering your account who are knowledgable and ready to support. They also have an office in New York, which makes their support even more localized.

Incentivized

I think they have quick and helpful customer service reps, however, I give them a 9 because I have had to wait on hold for long periods of time before.

ADP was our previous PEO and, in my experience, they were old, clunky and never got back to us. In my opinion, the customer service was non-existent. Insperity was out of our budget but I think it is a good product. Paychex Flex was similar and I like their product for payroll; however, we wanted to offer healthcare, commuter benefits and a 401k to employees and although Paychex is starting to offer those items through 3rd party providers, it wasn't as integrated of a solution as Justworks presented.

Incentivized

We have tested the QuickBooks Online platform. Before using Square, we tried QuickBooks, but the experience we had was not to our liking. QuickBooks Online is a much more complicated platform to use, the interface is much larger and has complexity in the configuration of the collection of hours of work of the employees. In addition, QuickBooks technical support does not respond in time to users' doubts, on several occasions we had several doubts about the operation of the platform and the response was too late and inconsistent. We decided to use Square Payroll because it offered us a much more accessible UI, a simpler but more precise interface for what we needed in our company, to be able to make payroll payments and make detailed reports on the workers.

Incentivized

• The tool is much cheaper than hiring an outsourced payroll provider (cheaper than other PEO).
• Cheaper than going to market for health insurance on our own.
• Manages all employment tax, etc. which is a huge help and would require additional resources to manage without Justworks.

Incentivized

• Square Payroll has dramatically reduced the time it takes to process payroll.
• We could have a faster payroll with the Square POS integration for commission, but that is not something we've implemented yet.

Incentivized