Zenefits sent us an email on Friday which seems to have attracted no attention.
When you originally set up Zenefits, you created an Zenefits admin user in your ADP RUN payroll account to let Zenefits manage your payroll—set up new employees, manage deductions, remove departing employees—on your behalf.
Yesterday, without your permission, ADP systematically deactivated these accounts—accounts that you set up, in your payroll system, to allow Zenefits to work on your behalf. The reason for this is that ADP believes it can one day build software to compete with Zenefits, and in the meantime they would like to do anything they can to impede Zenefits.
ADP is claiming that they are taking this action for "security" reasons—but this is clearly not true. For years, ADP has let customers add third parties—a bookkeeper or an accounting firm, for example—to their payroll system to manage payroll on a company's behalf. What Zenefits does is no different. In fact, even today, ADP will let you add a third-party administrator to your payroll system unless they have a Zenefits.com email address.
To avoid the Intuit upsell quagmire, we're hoping to switch to ZenPayroll for Q3. But the Zenefits automatic quote builder doesn't seem to know that ZenPayroll is nationwide now, so down the support rabbit hole I go. Payroll sucks.
My horrible ADP story: years ago, ADP debited the IRS taxes twice -- so all the paychecks bounced, or would have if the bank hadn't called me and let me move money into the payroll account from the main account (yes kids, don't let your payroll, or anyone, deduct money directly from your company's main account). It was a couple of hundred K.
Customer service was completely uninterested. Finally I got it escalated to the manager of the local ADP office. He said he couldn't understand why I was upset -- the IRS would just credit us the amount next month. He also couldn't understand why I kept saying that they had taken the money out without authorization: "we didn't take your money -- we sent it to the IRS. We don't have your money so it makes no sense to give it back to you. I actually have no mechanism to put money _into_ a customer account anyway." Finally I got annoyed and agreed with him: "you're right, I shouldn't say you 'took' it, I should use the correct term: 'felony grand theft.' And if I don't have the money in my account by the 4pm I will discuss this with the Santa Clara Sheriff."
Magically, the company that had "no mechanism to put money into a customer account" managed to put $250K into our payroll account by the time the fed wire closed. Who would have guessed?
That's the last payroll I ran with ADP.