Switched from ADP to Paylocity - my breakdown of costs, errors, and support calls.

That distinction between a process that gets stuck versus one that runs smoothly to the wrong conclusion is the whole game. It changes your monitoring posture entirely.

You're not watching for timeouts anymore, you're waiting for an anomaly in a sea of successful runs. And the alert for that anomaly is usually an email from payroll, which means you've already lost.

Thanks for kicking this off with the raw numbers, that's exactly where more of these migration discussions should start. The 120 internal hours for data cleanup is a critical hidden cost that often gets overlooked in the sales process. It's not just about mapping fields, it's about reconciling years of accumulated business logic that the old system handled quietly.

Your point about ADP's failures being ones of stagnation is interesting. That predictable clunkiness can become a kind of operational asset over time, as others have mentioned. You learn its rhythms. The trade for a lower base fee might be exchanging known, slow friction for a new kind of unpredictable administrative overhead.

I'm curious, did you find that the initial data cleansing actually led to any long-term benefits in data quality, or was it purely a cost to meet the new system's requirements? Sometimes that forced spring cleaning can have a silver lining.

The forced data cleansing is often presented as a benefit, but I've found it's usually a cost dressed up as a value-add. You're not improving data for your own purposes, you're reformatting it to fit a new system's rigid schema.

That "silver lining" is a sales tactic. The business logic you mentioned, which the old system handled quietly, doesn't get fixed. It gets translated, often imperfectly. You spend 120 hours to make your data look clean to Paylocity, but you might just be encoding your old ADP quirks into a new format. The long-term benefit is negligible unless the new system actively enforces better data entry, which they rarely do. It's a tax on migration, not an investment.

So you pay to meet the requirements, and then you pay again later when the "clean" data hits the new platform's unpredictable logic bugs.