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ADP intentionally broke its Zenefits integration
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.
- bigtones 11y agoWe experienced these problems at my startup using these two technologies too.
- bwb 11y agoWe use ADP and they are one of the worst companies to work with, very very difficult and their web interface is like the 90s.
- netaustin 11y agoThat's what initially sold us on Zenefits, though — it puts a reasonably polished interface on ADP, which is reliable enough for the commodity money transfer service it provides, I guess. Same goes for Aetna — Zenefits puts a nice UI on commodity health insurance. Working with a traditional broker was a nightmare.
- fweespeech 11y agoYeah, this is why relying on potential competitors generally leads to all sorts of sadness. :/
- cgoodmac 11y agoI'm biased since I work there, but it's worth checking out justworks.com - payroll/benefits/HR/everything in one place, no need to integrate with different providers.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- HongQiGong 11y agoTry using Justworks.
- saryant 11y agoYou're not fooling anyone.
- calcsam 11y agoEngineer at Zenefits. Can confirm this.
- lambdasquirrel 11y agoSince we conveniently have an inside man, which one of the payroll providers would you recommend us use when we start a startup?
- voska 11y agoWhy not buy up some other domains and setup forwarding to your Zenefits employees. This way ADP can't block you and your customers still get the benefit!
- ne0n 11y agoThat would be pretty easy to figure out. You can't really keep that one a secret because you have to tell your users to switch it in their accounts. A simple dns lookup will tell you if it's pointing to zenefits.com. And if ADP already knows the accounts that use zenefits, I'm sure they're just going to watch them to find patterns. Even if you bought 10 domains, your customers still have to share them, and ADP still knows who they are. You could probably do that for brand new customers, if you keep the number of people on the same domain to a minimum. Seems like a lot of work to me.
- op00to 11y agoWhy not make the vendor an email address on the customers domain? We do that all the time for contractors.
- rblatz 11y agoADP has some of the worst online offerings. In order to see my paystub or signup for health coverage I use one site. To request time off I have to use a different ADP site. Both have different usernames and passwords. Both sites look like they were made in the IE 5/6 web development drought. I have no real complaints though with how everything actually works though, never had an incorrect paycheck or messed up PTO.
- Someone1234 11y agoIt is pretty typical to split sensitive personal information (e.g. SSN, pay, health records, etc) from administrative activities (e.g. leave requests). In the event that the administrative side gets compromised, it will limit how "bad" that compromise might be, additionally they may be required to store sensitive information differently (e.g. better physical security, server-drive encryption, etc).
- voidlogic 11y agoIn a well designed system this kind of segmentation and isolation can be done in a way that is transparent to the user experience. TL;DR Have your front end talk to multiple backends-
- zimbatm 11y agoThe front end is where it usually gets compromised
- goodweather 11y agobut they share the same username and password on the different portal?
- Dylan16807 11y agoThen both passwords get captured on the front end. There's no benefit to multiple accounts unless the more important one is used much more rarely.
- tomjen3 11y agoIf the problem is the email address, why not give them one of your companies emails?
- Someone1234 11y agoThe way I read it, that would work. But since the intent of the action is clearly to cut off the competition, why would we assume they will stop at "just" email address? That's their first sortie in what could become a long war. Next it could be IP address, then they could subtly alter their API to break automated access (and give out a different API to trusted insiders), and so on. Ultimately when it comes to web-scraping and unauthorised usage, the advantage is always with the home team. They have the ability to change things any time they want, and the user is always caught behind every change (and they could literally change things once a day).
- olafskyansian 11y agoI'm pretty sure that aside from Zen Payroll and Intuit there is no actual API in place. Why on God's green earth should a change I make in Zenefits take two friggin' days to show up in ADP? That's not an API. That's a high-school dropout earning minimum wage entering into ADP they changes you made in Zenefits. I don't agree with ADP's heavy handed approach, but if this "integration" is Zenefits' service, they have half a billion in the bank to make it better now.
- randall 11y agoJust sign up for ZenPayroll first and then back port into zenefits. That's what we did.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- whoiskevin 11y agoI have to put the blame on Zenefits here. You cannot offer something to a customer that depends on integration with a competitor. Shame on you. No I don't support ADP and am not a fan but basic business dictates that you should not even offer this service if it depends on integration with a competitor.
- tomasien 11y agoZenefits' entire service is about re-selling and managing other services. That's like saying an accountant is at fault for relying on payroll processors that may someday decide they want to be accountants too - of course they're not at fault, that's how accounting is DONE. This is ridiculous on ADPs part.
- jusben1369 11y agoI'm not close enough on the details so I could be wrong. But it sounds like a) Zenefits integrates to ADP and starts being the flow through for payroll. b) Zenefits decides to become a direct competitor to ADP by launching their own payroll service (ZenPayroll mentioned here) c) ADP isn't enthusiastic about supporting a service that plans to upsell or cross sell shared customers to move away from them.
- reedloden 11y agoZenefits and ZenPayroll are two completely different companies. Don't let the "Zen" part confuse you. :)
- tomasien 11y agoZenpayroll and Zenefits are different companies and unrelated except that they both did Y Combinator.
- jusben1369 11y agoThanks to both of you for correcting me
- jgalt212 11y agoYes, Zenefits seems to be a nice wrapper around other services with bad UI/UX. That being said, we researched using Zenefits for our 401k, and they work with Ubiquity. Ubiquity has a very nice front end we saw no reason to have a Zenefits account just to access Ubiquity.
- rvdm 11y agoI've been very happy with ZenPayroll for paying my employees so far. Going to check out justworks though.
- _delirium 11y agoBlocking any kind of automatic access not explicitly provided for (via an official API, often paid) is quickly becoming a business norm on the modern web, so this doesn't surprise me too much.
- threefour 11y agoI once had COBRA benefits administered by ADP and they everything they could to boot me off, and once they did they made a mockery of the appeals process (this was before the day of the Affordable Care Act when getting health care could be impossible otherwise).
- Osiris 11y agoWhen I started working at the startup I'm at, we were using Zenefits and Expensify. For some inexplicable reason, in the last few months everything got switched to ADP and Concur, both of which offer a worse experience than what we were using.
- ohitsdom 11y agoADP online access is awful. They make up a username for you, some combination of first initial, last name @ company name. Then the login isn't a modern system, it's the old "authentication required" browser pop up, which disables any user remembering or password managers. Such a pain to deal with!
- jhgg 11y agoYes. And there's a character limit so it cuts off half way through my company email.
- notwhereyouare 11y agowhen we first got them at work, if you failed to type your password correctly, you were locked out of being able to login until you closed your browser completely
- ohitsdom 11y agoI would love to see the amount of hours ADP support spends with customers who have locked out accounts. That figure alone should clearly tell them they have a design problem. Or is this issue just offloaded to the customers?
- notirk 11y agoIf you're using LastPass on Windows, you can install the LP Windows app and it can autofill the login box ADP uses. But it's still a hassle and takes a few extra clicks.
- gnoway 11y agoJust to add to this, KeePass worked using the old ADP portal system (portal.adp.com, a traditional 'authentication required' popup), but does not with the new portal (workforcenow.adp.com, a form-based login). For whatever reason the password field won't fill in. I don't know if LastPass is any different.
- 11y ago
- cbzink000 11y agoWhen I was back at an automotive startup, we had to write an integration with ADP's DMS. I can say without a doubt that it was the worst API I have ever had the misfortune of working with. Horribly buggy, the documentation didn't match the output, endpoints disappeared at random, different endpoints required different auth keys. Made no sense at all. I even remember a time when our ADP representative called us and said she thought the project should be called off due to the amount of malformed payloads we were sending her.... on our development account. Not production.. Not even testing. Development. ADP has left a bitter taste in my mouth since then.
- koyote 11y agoReading all these comments about how ADP is the worst for any of its online tools (and in my experience, it really is), could someone enlighten me as to why so many companies use them? Is there no alternative?
- adamsdayoff 11y agoIt's a combination of a) founders/ceos not being aware of alternatives, b) many perceived alternatives don't in fact offer an alternative, but a layer on top (zenefits). and c) since ADP is so difficult, the pain of getting off of them - and the perceived pain of switching to someone new, is a large enough disincentive to keep folks from switching. New companies like Justworks don't build on top of other systems but have built everything in house. You don't need to coordinate with payroll providers, or health insurance brokers, or even government agencies (to do your W2s, I9s, 1099s, etc) - because they literally do it all for you. On top of that, their software doesn't look like crap and their support staff is actually, you know, supportive. Oh, and they're not "Free" like Zenefits- but they save you so much on healthcare you end up spending less than you would on "Free" software that doesn't work.
- mixmastamyk 11y agoIt's not an uncommon situation when an incumbent is entrenched and have not faced real competition.
- HongQiGong 11y agoJustworks is a good alternative.
- 11y ago
- mergy 11y agoI'm very surprised ADP would even open themselves up like this to a competitor. The mythical ADP API has been hovering around for years. It feels like ADP just "fixed the glitch" in "Office Space" terms. Anyone going with an ADP competitor is going to have to get fully off ADP. This is a big risk for companies. ADP knows this and the overhead around compliance and other back-end work is massive. Any company trying to innovate in the HR space has the security blanket of ADP to combat. For those that take the risk on companies like Zen* or *Zen need to weigh it. ADP has already had to open-up a bit and improve systems over the last few years to go mobile and improve UI enough to not make it totally horrible. But, it typically comes down to compliance vs. innovation and ADP is the former. If ADP did "fix the glitch" here, it reaffirms the risk and peril of innovation when you still are dancing with the 800lb gorilla. HR folks don't want the headache of that dance and that is why ADP usually wins unless you can totally lap them.
- apalmer 11y agoI just went digging around the zenefits.com and pulled this verbiage out, which i think outlines the fundamental business problem: 'Zenefits works with all top payroll providers, so there's no need to switch from your favorite system.' ADP doesn't want to be a 'provider' in the 'Payroll As A Service' sense. Further Zenefits entry point into the market is based on the low friction of you not needing to leave your current payroll system... why on earth would ADP let this continue?
- markbnj 11y agoI see you getting downvoted, but I don't think that's fair. Whether people like it or not this is almost certainly how ADP views the situation. The term "disintermediation" used to be tossed around 10-15 years ago, to describe the process of upstart tech companies getting between older, slower moving companies and their customers. ADP is definitely in the older, slower moving category. Defense is probably the only real offense they can bring to bear. I know they do business as a back office provider to various resellers who target segments they aren't particularly good at servicing. They probably don't view the Internet as a candidate for this, though.
- matthewsimon 11y agoSorry to quibble, but I don't think that's what "disintermediation" means. Disintermediation typically refers to "cutting out the middleman", not introducing additional middlemen. Cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation
- markbnj 11y agoIt's been a long time since I heard the term, probably late 90's or somewhere in that timeframe. At the time I was in the banking business and there were various services that were launching with the idea of aggregating bank accounts, rolling up loan offers into portals, etc. The term "disintermediation" was used as a label for what happened to you if you let someone else capture your customer's attention and just treat you like a supplier. I'm sure there were other uses at the time, and later.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pbreit 11y agoThis seems as inevitable as Zenefits developing its own payroll service.
- rexreed 11y agoWhy bother with ADP when there are so many other payroll solutions. The better option for startups with better things to do than manage HR and operations, is to use a PEO like TriNet and not even bother with any of this. Focus on your core business and outsource everything else.
- beachstartup 11y agoone reason i didn't sign up for zenefits (other than the sales guy was a pushy dickhead) was that they weren't able to clearly articulate how they would integrate with our payroll (a large american bank). i knew in the end it would be me, typing shit from one browser window to another, and i knew it would break often. zenefits sounds great on paper but i'm still unconvinced it's that much better than just doing things by hand for small companies like ours.
- jeffasinger 11y agoThis is basically because Zenefits and ADP indirectly compete. ADP, Paychex and some other major payroll providers make quite a bit of money be using their relationships with companies to sell insurance and other benefits to their customers. Zenefits is basically an insurance broker, and therefore competing with ADP on this front (which is a lot of revenue for both companies). Payroll really shouldn't suck, the basics of it should be pretty easy. The problem is that the vast majority of payroll providers are nearly impossible to work with. Disclosure: I work at Employii, a company that makes payroll/hr software designed for integration with insurance brokers.
- olafskyansian 11y agoWhen you think about where the $$$ is, they DIRECTLY compete. I think the thing people don't realize is that there is way more money in insurance than there is in payroll, ADP knows this and so does Paychex. At my last company, I think we paid about $90 per employee per year for payroll processing, W-2s and employee self-service. A broker commission for health insurance is conservatively 3% of the total annual premium. So with an average family premium (employee and employer) hovering around $17k a year, the commission on that plan would be $500+ dollars, well over five times what you could earn by actually doing payroll. an employee electing single coverage with a total premium around $7k a year is still far and away more valuable than "payroll" If you look at ADPs earnings transcripts for the past year, you'll see this area is where the growth is at. It's even stronger at Paychex where benefits constitutes basically all of their growth.
- enknamel 11y agoIf ADP doesn't want to work with a competing third party that is their right. This is why you should never base a business on the goodwill of a platform. We saw the same shenanigans all the time in social and mobile gaming.
- SomeStupidPoint 11y agoZenefits isn't relying on goodwill -- they're actually a subcontractor of the customer of ADP, so ADP is actually blocking their own (paying) customers. ADP is saying that they'll delete the logins of customers who use a particular subcontracting firm, because they don't want their customers to use that firm's services. I think you don't quite understand what the situation is here.
- noahmbarr 11y agoPaychex's idea of an API is a PDF output #nojoke
- olafskyansian 11y agoNow now...they are making huge strides in the world of .csv files too
- hurlio333 11y agoI sometimes wonder if PayPal is doing this with FreshBooks. FB integration is fine with lots of providers; for whatever reason PayPal is constantly down.
- evanm 11y agoADP is in my axis of evil. Their employee and employer-systems are horrendously out of date and their support is non-existent. Let them fail.
- olafskyansian 11y agoHere is ADP's response to this brouhaha. http://www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-and-Zenefits.pdf http://www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-an... What I don't get is if the integration is one-way from Zenefits to ADP (and not vice versa) why all the data allegedly being pulled back from ADP?
- HongQiGong 11y ago"Despite Zenefits serving less than 0.25% of the clients on our system, they had been responsible for up to 25.0% of the total user traffic (in other words, a hundred-fold times ordinary user traffic)." Wow that's crazy. What are they doing over there?
- c-slice 11y agoWhy cant zenefits become their own payroll provider?
- nathan_f77 11y agoZenPayroll has been developing payroll software for over 3 years now, and have only gone nationwide in the last few months. It's a very complex product to build.
- lexap 11y agoI hope I never have to use ADP, but that said, their response makes Zenefits sound like a bunch of crybaby Valleyholes. http://www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-and-Zenefits.pdf http://www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-an...
- crystaln 11y agoIf only they put as much effort into their product as they do toward defending their honor.
- gumby 11y agoI understand why ADP does this -- they are horrible to work with so people are willing to stick someone like Zenefits in between. 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.
- iiiggglll 11y ago> That's the last payroll I ran with ADP. Nicely done. Which service did you start using instead of ADP?
- gumby 11y agoFirst I switched to Paychex which back then was a startup founded by a bunch of ADP folks who thought they could do better. And they could, until they grew big (and I believe were acquired). So now I use PrimePay. I heard about it from a friend who runs a restaurant, amazingly enough, but they have been good for several companies with headcount in the hundreds and in multiple states.
- scottorn 11y agoI'm COO of a Startup CFO Firm, Kruze Consulting. We work with 135 startups. We use Zenefits heavily in our practice and we've signed Zenefits' petition and are working with Management to spread the word. If your startup is caught up in this, call my cell 415-652-6380, and I'll help you switch payroll providers.
- uvince 11y agoAppropriately ADP responds with a PDF: www.adp.com/zenefits/downloads/The-Facts-About-ADP-and-Zenefits.pdf
- smsm42 11y agoWell, at least it's not a Word file, so some credit must be given.
- Mangrove 11y agoMangrove is always an option for payroll. www.mangrovesoftware.com
- Mangrove 11y agoMangrove is always an option. No integration needed. One stop shop. www.mangrovesoftware.com
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kferber007 11y agoCFO - Current user of zenefits & ADP here I authorized Zenefits to look into our data. ADP's feelings on how Zenefits looks and grabs that data are moot (also, how would they know if they are unsecure). This is not an "unauthorized_ integration" because I specifically signed Parker Conrad to be my broker of record. I understand where ADP is coming from (they tried to sell us PEO a month ago, at at crazy high price) because they can't compete on price or product. So they compete on access. However, they messed with our Zenefits Sync without my permission, so now I will simply replace ADP with Zenpayroll or Wagepoint, or the one people seem to be throwing around here "justworks". I will take my $13,000 in payroll fees somewhere else.
- obornii 11y agoCFO - Current user of zenefits & ADP here I authorized Zenefits to look into our data. ADP's feelings on how Zenefits looks and grabs that data are moot (also, how would they know if they are unsecure). This is not an "unauthorized_ integration" because I specifically signed Parker Conrad to be my broker of record. I understand where ADP is coming from (they tried to sell us PEO a month ago, at at crazy high price) because they can't compete on price or product. So they compete on access. However, they messed with our Zenefits Sync without my permission, so now I will simply replace ADP with Zenpayroll or Wagepoint, or the one people seem to be throwing around here "justworks". I will take my $13,000 in payroll fees somewhere else.
- BowtieTechie 11y ago$13,000 in payroll alone is way too much! I would love to show you the Justworks value! Feel free to stalk me or reach out via twitter. @BowtieTechie
- footballguy 11y agoADPs technology is so far advanced relative to Zenefits it is not even close. Anyone with any know Edge of these systems knows that.
- tedchs 11y agoI see both sides of this. It sounds like Zenefits was scraping the HTML interface of ADP's web site, and according to ADP's response, generating huge volumes of traffic. Around here, there is a bias that startup = white knight and incumbent = arrogant and malicious. If it was me, I would have probably disabled these accounts too under my ToS against negatively impacting the system for other users. I also see that Zenefits needs to move quickly. Is there an ADP API they could be using?
- scodtt 11y agoThe Zenefits CEO said ADP was like Dirty Harry. He should say that, because Clint Eastwood was dirty, but he only killed the "punks." I came up with a better movie analogy: Paddington Bear: https://www.blogmutt.com/blog/zenefits-adp https://www.blogmutt.com/blog/zenefits-adp
- anshubansal2000 11y agoBoycott ADP. This is mainstream big corporation and their payroll system is from 80s with ugly UI. Noone even can't login with this old stinking technology. Support Zenefits.