Namely Reviews

Pros

Namely is a great human resource management system. We are a tech firm, and the platform has received nothing but praise from our developers. Our HR services are now more streamlined than ever thanks to the intuitive reporting and various modules that allow us to devote more time to strategic rather than administrative tasks.

Cons

The months-long process of finalizing API feeds has slowed down the processing of layoffs and new hiring with their perks with our many partners. The resolution of this issue will also simplify our situation.

Pros

I appreciate how quick and easy it is to check my benefits and salary. Leave of absence requests can also be submitted. The onboarding procedure at Namely is streamlined. It's useful for maintaining legal conformity. The payroll system I use has a very responsive customer service team.

Cons

There are sometimes too many hoops to jump through and paperwork to submit before a desired change can be implemented. For instance, the system required us to acquire and present an authorization letter of the IRS in order to change the company name. For some reason, filing taxes under the new name wasn't good enough.

Pros

Super easy to use, great UI, have had no issues so far

Cons

To be honest, I have ran into no issues so far on Namely

Pros

When we started out, we had an 80% great implementation team, and the only part that was lacking was payroll. Well, 2+ years later the *only* think going well is payroll, but issues still exist that we told them about *at implementation*. So what do I like best? Literally just our Payroll Admin. She is fantastic and does a terrific job.

Cons

Things were bad with Namely, then they were acquired by a benefits brokerage and the tech has definitely taken a backseat. Simple things like LOA administration are not even built into the tooling, and their support is a mess. After 2+ years, we finally have a dedicated rep, and he is trying, but their team doesn't even know their own tech. I asked a question about a feature that *should* be necessary in expense reimbursement, for audit compliance. Their support said it didn't exist. I found it buried in the back end *by accident* two weeks later. That does not inspire confidence.

Pros

Its affordable price, full customer support and tools to comply with laws makes Namely my best choice. Namely also impressed me with its modern, no-frills interface which made it easy to complete HR tasks like running payroll or requesting feedback with a few clicks.

Cons

Lacks internal communication features. Also, it has limited reporting and analytics functionality.

Pros

Namely is far better than Paychex, which we used previously. All the necessary functionality is there, and it serves its purpose.

Cons

Although miles better than paychex, Namely leaves a lot to be desired from an employee user experience. The portal is not intuitive to navigate, the functionality for performance reviews is basic, and overall I find myself needing to reach out to HR often for help navigating the platform.

Pros

The customer service is outstanding and can't complain about it. From the end user's perspective, it is great to see all the information in one place, such as benefits, changes over time in benefits and PTO, payroll, and birthdays, etc.

Cons

Could not create an organizational chart, and the reporting does not meet our needs due to our more complex structure.

Pros

It has a great range of tools for hr management, especially tracking the leave or vacation time of employees. It also makes reports collecting all this data. You can also manage performance reviews.

Cons

The API provided by Namely has limited customisations for developers as well as rate limits. If you don't have experience working with such softwares, it can be difficult at first to understand all the functionalities of the interface.

Pros

Once set up, Namely is very easy to use and has a very friendly interface.

Cons

No issues so far. Some submenus could be better arranged, specially in the goal settings section.

Pros

Namely has been a powerful payroll management tool.
The features of Namely are brilliant.

Cons

I do not dislike Namely.
Namely has been dependable.

Pros

It's easy to use and has all the information we need easily accessible in one spot.

Cons

Sometimes things are not in the tab I would think they are in.

Pros

I enjoyed using Namely because the interface was intuitive and all documents and information were easy to find.

Cons

I truthfully didn't have any issues using Namely. I feel that out of all of the HR/employee platforms I've used Namely is the simplest option. Everything you need is accessible and easy to find, and the platform isn't overly complicated compared to some competitor platforms.

Pros

Was very easy to use from an interface standpoint and they had some good built in community options

Cons

This was a highly innovative product when we began using it but 4 years in the product never innovated and their support completely fell apart. Their pricing was dramatically higher than the rest of the market for a product that was behind competitors

Pros

In comparison to other all-in-one HRIS systems, the interface is a lot more friendly. It marries the concept of social media newsfeeds with HR, allowing employees to comment on each other's birthdays and anniversaries. This gives HR an opportunity to engage employees with a fresh approach to benefits, payroll, and compliance.

Cons

I'm unsure of the experience of other customers, but the concept of Namely never took hold for our organization. Beginning at implementation, the Namely team was disorganized and unstable. Implementation was scheduled to wrap up October 1 and wasn't completed until January. During that time, Namely's implementation team experienced turnover 3 times, each time having to reset our implementation schedule. Information was missed, uploaded incorrectly, recreated, etc... They missed the ACA filing deadline and we had to work with an outside vendor with additional costs. They filed our taxes incorrectly and this still has not been resolved. On the benefits side, the agent assigned to our team miscalculated the rates from the plan we chose. According to the rates on the spreadsheet, we chose this particular carrier because it seemed these were the best rates and value. We had our open enrollment meetings and an employee pointed out that the numbers were incorrect, that she would be paying up some amount more per month. We had the agent resend us the sheet, we broke down the formulas, and identified the incorrect formula. Thankfully, our agent forgot to submit our enrollment form and we missed the deadline with the carrier. The integration with Adobe Sign has never been successful, so we have not had a single successful Onboarding through Namely. Instead of fixing glitches in the systems, they have built around them which makes it less intuitive (ex. build a new hire's profile including payroll info, send the onboarding packet, then after the new hire starts, go back into the profile to add the payroll group. When I asked why we weren't able to add the payroll group while we are adding payroll info at the start, they explained the glitch.) Compared to other systems, reports have a long way to go. Most come back blank after being ran. We have experienced more turnover in Namely's account managers. With all of the errors and issues we have needed to remedy, we simply did not have time to encourage use of the system. The time off app crashes, so we have lost engagement in the system. Rather than risk any further damage to the organization, we have implemented BambooHR (which is wonderful) and now let Namely sit silently in the background. It has been costly and frustrating, for the admin as well as the employees.

Pros

Namely is easy to navigate for the admins and our employees. The social aspect that everybody can share on the dashboard is great. Payroll service is also very satisfactory. Customer service improved from an year ago. We have received fast and helpful responses to our inquiries. Benefits management in the system is also intuitive. We had smooth last Open Enrollment.

Cons

One of the features that I wish to improve is the Namely Time reporting. Majority of our employees are hourly so when we are looking for reporting on the hours worked the reports are not robust and involves lots of time cleaning to get to the information you need. PTO tracking for hourly and salary and reporting it could be better and less confusing.
Another feature I wish to improve is the Namely Benefits as a broker. We had signed up previously but then ended up with another broker as many errors occurred in our benefits management and lack of commutation with our broker. File feed management during open enrollment could improved also.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Namely is used as our HRIS and payroll system. I has an onboarding module that was incredibly helpful in digitizing our entire onboarding system and allowing all the info to flow into HRIS and payroll. The EE review feature has also streamlined our review process

Cons

The implementation required heavy lifting to present our data into a Namely prescribed spreadsheets. I wished there were better mapping that would have required more on Namely's part. (2) some of the place holding features that exist in payroll are not available on the HRIS side. Ex: if I want to view deductions for many EEs I can go the deduction location and click through and easily view one EEs info after another. If I want to do the same within HRIS I cannot. So there are many, many clicks required to accomplish the same task.

Pros

I liked that this was a one-stop-shop for all things HR and payroll. Functionality was easy and entire platform was intuitive.

Cons

The price. As with anything, good service comes at a premium. At least we got what we pay for.

Pros

Namely is simply a great platform for HR, Payroll, and benefits management within the organizational framework, as it helps to create better workplaces with varying functionality to adapt in small to mid-size businesses and comply with different regulations at work.

Cons

No particular downsides of the software. Sometimes, I got a problem syncing employee's data to Namely. The API call is not worth handled by the application and keeps me disconnected. Hope this would be solved in the next update.

Pros

Before my company started using Namely, we were submitting our time-off requests on paper and routing through multiple mailboxes for approvals. We did not have a reliable and convenient system for managing our leave accrual or communicating with busy managers about PTO requests. Now, all of that information is at our fingertips, approvals are a breeze, and it's easier for managers to keep track of all of their direct reports' schedules. Namely also allows us to view our pay stubs and benefits information at any time, and complete our annual open enrollment, all within the software. I would highly recommend the service to any organization looking to improve its efficiency for HR processes.

Cons

At our company, employees accrue comp time for working weekend events throughout the year. Namely does not allow us to enter that comp time in a formal system that is tracked electronically. Instead, we keep track of it on our own, and when we enter PTO requests as "comp time for XYZ event", it is on the honor system. Not a huge complaint, but would be nice if we could track that piece of our PTO the same way we can vacation time, sick time, etc.

Pros

As an HRIS Namely is as good as it gets. After using many other platforms in the past, I can say that Namely provides an easy to use platform that works out of the box but offers a great deal of customization to fit your workflows. They are constantly releasing new features and improvements that are visible and useful with a support staff that is always ready to help.

Having HRIS, Payroll and Benefits in one place and dedicated client rep and dedicated benefits rep is definetely hard to beat.

Cons

Integration between payroll and HRIS is a work in progress that still needs work. I am confident they will continue to improve it moving forward.

Pros

Love that it is so customizable and I can add whatever data fields I need and the majority of these data fields are reportable (the reporting feature on pretty much any field is incredibly helpful for us). Namely listens to its customers and continuously adds features that address pain points.

Cons

These aren't cons per se but they are pain points for us: as wonderful as the customizability in adding data fields is, the HRIS is kind of basic in terms of functionality that just make sense - for example data flowing from the HRIS to the payroll system (only some of it actually does), terminations, rehires and benefit enrollment, not being able to edit onboarding templates (need to copy the template, edit and then create vs. just making edits to a current one) ...

Pros

I love the payroll function for Namely. It is user friendly, accurate, and reliable. I also love working with a dedicated payroll rep each payroll cycle to help make things run smooth and efficiently!

Cons

There are some missing features on Namely, like the ability to have recurring monthly deductions versus deductions each check. I would also like to see some improvements to the performance management system.

Pros

-Excellent customer support.
-One stop solution for HRIS, Payroll, and Benefits.
-Very customizable for different use cases.
-Constant and reliable product updates and roadmap.

Cons

-Document storage is not robust
-While the tool is very customizable, it is a slight learning curve to master the smaller details.

Pros

We are a non-profit organization that works seasonal. Most of our employees are retired and have challenges using different technology, but with Namely they are able to adapt to our new system fairly quickly. We like how the system is user-friendly for both admin and user side.

Cons

There are some reporting options that are not available for admin, but I was able to obtain the reports that I needed through the service team.

Pros

The user experience is simple and easy to navigate.

Cons

The build out for open enrollment and feeds is extremely lengthy and pricey.