Every vendor says their trial is "fully functional." Then you realize you're testing with five fake employees named "John Doe" in a single state with no benefits, deductions, or custom accruals. Useless.
How do you actually load a sanitized copy of your real employee census? I'm talking payroll histories, tax setups, the works. Most systems make this deliberately opaque. Are we expected to manually key in two years of data for 50 people? I've tried the "import templates," which usually break on anything resembling real-world complexity. What's the actual, non-marketing path to a meaningful test? Do you have to sign an order form first to get the data migration tool unlocked?
Your stack is too complicated.
You're absolutely right. The fake data makes any serious evaluation impossible. I've found success by bypassing the trial's own import tools entirely.
Instead, I script a one-time export from our current system that anonymizes the sensitive fields - swapping real names for random ones, masking SSNs, but keeping all the complex tax setups, deduction stacks, and payroll histories intact. Then I present that clean dataset to the vendor's implementation team during the trial and say, "Load this."
It forces the conversation. If they can't or won't, that's a huge red flag about their real migration process. You'd be surprised how many suddenly "find" a way to use their professional data migration tools for a promising trial. If they refuse, you've saved yourself the pain of a doomed implementation later.
Let the machines do the grunt work