Paychex Flex Payroll Software Review

A Brief Overview of Payroll Software

Old-school methods for payroll tracking were incredibly time-consuming. Even small businesses needed to invest way too much time into things like calculating payroll manually, tracking hours, writing checks, and calculating taxes. Thankfully, technology has simplified this process significantly.

Today, entrepreneurs can instead pay a reasonable monthly fee to one of many payroll software services and receive automated assistance with these and other related tasks. Paychex Flex is one of the best payroll software providers available, so let’s find out if it’s the ideal option for you.

Paychex Flex Payroll Software Review

Paychex Flex is an outstanding payroll software solution for any small-to-midsize business that needs in-depth recordkeeping and reporting tools. Let’s take a look at some of its pros and cons before we dig into the details.

Pros

• 160+ custom reports available
• Custom data fields
• 24/7 support

Cons

• Additional fees for account setup
• Additional fees for tax filings

The Details of Paychex Flex Payroll Software

At $39 per month (plus $5 per employee or contractor), Paychex Flex has relatively average pricing for this industry. The Paychex small business payroll service offers more customizable and in-depth tools than most competitors in this price range. However, there are also some common tools most competitors include that will cost you extra with Paychex Flex.

Overall Pricing and Value:

Paychex Flex’s pricing is right around the industry average for payroll software. However, the fact that there are additional fees for account setup and tax filings is disappointing. Most competitors include these features at no extra charge.

That said, Paychex Flex is a more in-depth tool than many of these competitors, with the ability to create more than 160 custom payroll reports to give you insight into your company’s taxation, staffing, turnover, pay scales, and more. In addition, the ability to create custom data fields is another aspect you don’t often see in competitors’ payroll software offerings.

That said, if your company doesn’t need these advanced features, there may not be any real reason to use Paychex Flex instead of one of its lower-priced competitors (like Patriot, Workful, Square, etc.).

Track Record:

Paychex is one of the industry giants for payroll services in America. This company has been around since 1971, and it has more than 700,000 active business clients in the United States and northern Europe. Even more impressively, Paychex is such a widespread service that roughly 1 in 12 American workers receive their paychecks from Paychex.

There are plenty of reviews for Paychex Flex available online, as we tracked down roughly 3,000 of them on various reputable third-party review aggregator websites. The vast majority of these reviews are positive, giving Paychex Flex another strong selling point.

Customer Support:

One of Paychex Flex’s big claims to fame is its incredible offer of 24/7 customer support with entirely U.S.-based representatives. When most of its competitors only offer support on weekdays, and some of them have very limited hours of availability, the ability to contract Paychex whenever it’s convenient for you is a godsend.

The only weakness for Paychex in this area is the fact that, as such a large company, it’s not available to offer the same level of personalization as some smaller competitors. Still, it’s awfully difficult to frame this category as anything other than a big plus for Paychex Flex.

Ease of Use:

There wouldn’t be much point in using a payroll software service if it didn’t make the process of running and tracking payroll significantly simpler. Thankfully, Paychex Flex does just that, with an easy-to-use interface and plenty of intuitive features.

That said, Paychex Flex has so many features that it can be a bit daunting when you first get started, but we feel like its learning curve is quite manageable.

What Are Customers Saying About Paychex Flex Payroll Software?

We found 2,960 unique customer reviews of Paychex Flex, spread across Consumer Affairs, GetApp, G2, and TrustRadius. Most of these reviews are positive, as Paychex Flex maintains an average rating score of roughly 4.2 out of 5 across these four websites.

In these reviews, customers tend to discuss how pleased they are with the robust features included with Paychex Flex, as well as complimenting the company’s 24/7 support. Overall, customer feedback is a strong point for Paychex Flex. There are companies out there with higher average rating scores, but Paychex Flex does pretty well in this category as well.

Our Final Thoughts

Paychex Flex is our favorite payroll software service for companies in need of in-depth recordkeeping and reporting tools. We’re big fans of this company’s track record and 24/7 customer support as well.

We’re big fans of what Paychex Flex has to offer for payroll services, and we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this company to our families and friends. That said, we understand that this might not be the right company for everyone.

If you’d like to take a look at your other options for payroll software services, take a look at our guide to the best companies in the industry.