RE: HR/Payroll Systems

It has been many years since I worked on such a system.

Something else for you to check, that I have not seen mentioned in this thread, is the timeliness of of the software vendor coming out with upgrades mandated by the IRS.

Here's how it used to go for us.
The W2's etc. have to go out at exactly this time of year.
Every year the feds, and some years the state, come up with new stuff that needs to go in the reports.
Software houses find out about this stuff 6 months in advance of the deadline.
Other people find out 2-3 months in advance.
As soon as we hear, we ask our software vendor for an ETA on the upgrades to meet the new rules. They are unable to guarantee anything.
We write and test modification to meet the new rules. We have to have the source code to be able to do this. Buying software without source code is cheaper than buying with.
In April or May of the new year, the vendor comes out with upgrades to meet the new rules that had to be on the W2 etc. stuff sent out at beginning of that year.
We then figure out how to combine the vendor's upgrades with our modifications, and test the results. Sometimes the vendor fixes are flawed.
In some cases, the vendor fixes do not come out until over a year after the government deadline.

There's also an issue with OS versions. Suppose you have a PC that has Client Access or other connection to iSeries/400, does not have the latest version of Windows, multiple staff who need to access the same data base. Is the HR/Payroll software compatible with whatever your network solution is? Some are not. When you upgrade the PCs to next version of Windoze, does this disrupt the HR/Payroll software access? Can you function Ok if different people in same dept are on different versions of Windoze?

There were some HR people who lost their jobs. About the same time as us going through the Y2K conversion on our ERP on 400, the head of HR was replacing the HR system, which was on Windows. Dec 1999 our company was greeted with the news that the new HR system was not Y2K compliant and could not be fixed. The vendor that it was purchased from, at bargain prices, was because that vendor was deliberately going out of business in 1999. Our company managed to survive a while without any HR system, and new management for HR.
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Al Mac