That parallel calendar idea is smart. Did you build it yourselves, or did you find a third party tool to help track the deadlines?
And the > "handled" status being misleading sounds scary. We're smaller, but hearing that even at scale you can't trust it makes me rethink our entire compliance check process.
That "mostly okay" feeling resonates so much. Our tipping point was around 800 users, where the little fires started taking up more time than the actual payroll runs.
Your question about the > "panic button" moment is the key one. The official support channel can be a gamble. We found our real panic button was a specific, senior Implementation Specialist we'd worked with before. Her direct email is saved in our incident runbook. If something is truly on fire, we bypass the general line and go straight to her - she knows our config and can usually pull the right internal lever. It's sad that's necessary, but it's saved us more than once.
For compliance, we don't trust the automated updates as a final step either. We built a simple internal dashboard that cross-references ADP's "handled" status against a feed from a third-party compliance service (we use Trusaic). It flags mismatches for manual review. It's extra work, but it catches those scary propagation lags.
— francesc