Marg Namely

The HRIS front end is good for onboarding and employee information management. And the Analytics tool is a major upgrade (because they implemented Looker's product instead of building something themselves. The native Namely reporting is really really bad - it cannot even sort dates correctly.

enefits Administration and Payroll products are very bad. Be sure you ask to see these in detail when you're buying because they will mostly show you the glossy front end. The part your teams actually needs to work in is pretty terrible and very poorly tied together. We are constantly finding things that Namely needs to fix, and they usually don't fix it correctly the first time.

y People Ops team has gone to extraordinary efforts to fix a number of things. The service we receive and the quality of follow through is horrible. I would give Namely a 0 every day of the year, but this week's particular issue is that after a recent Open Enrollment period only about half of employee deductions were being made - despite TWO separate confirmations from my team with Namely that everything was setup. And that was AFTER Namely set the deductions up wrong in the first place. Two weeks ago we asked for some price relief for a set of employees that don't get payroll or benefits admin through Namely - and we were told no. It's just bad after bad after bad. The members of my team who use Namely are problem solvers, not complainers, and every single one cannot wait to get off of this platform.

We were drawn to the clean interface and onboarding tools within the program. The product still looks good, but that's about as much credit as I'll give.

Our biggest issue with Namely was on the benefits administration side. Their demo team implied that our benefits enrollment was completed automatically, but what they meant was we enrolled electronically and eventually someone on their team would get around to submitting that information to our carriers. Unfortunately, this was rarely the case. Over the year that we were with namely we we onboarded approximately 30 new employees. Nearly 100% of those onboards had a serious problem with their enrollment. They were either never actually enrolled in the benefits that they selected or they were enrolled in the wrong plans. I was patient the first 3 times, the subsequent 6 just confirmed that we couldn't continue on the platform. We paid for their "managed services" which was supposed to provide us with additional HR support and attention. We didn't even receive the bare minimum. I had employees showing up to the doctor thinking that they had health insurance only to find out that they had never been entered into the system. We had several "come to Jesus" discussions about this and every time they promised to fully audit our account and that it would never happen again. Even now, with a week left on the platform, I discovered another failed enrollment.

Beyond that, they also have a poor record of timely filing our state payroll returns. Despite providing them tax id's and UI information in new states, Namely did not update information and failed to file several state returns. In one case it took us 5 separate attempts to get them to resolve the issue (Q3 2018...reached resolution May 2019. They showed zero initiative for identifying failure points within their system that would lead to these misses and then also asked for additional fees to file the corrected/late forms. If you're caught in this trap, refuse to pay those fees.

The level or service to keep this product running isn't sustainable. You will likely have a very rough time.

Namely created many more problems than it solved. Their platform is almost entirely dependent on manual processes happening behind the scenes by undertrained junior professionals.

It's "OK". Not great at all. If I take out benefits admin it is just a HR platform of sorts, which ... I don't think carries much benefit.

We've used Namely for 3 years or so. This past year, we switched our health plan offerings. Although they do a customized onboarding/intro for the company, and produce a packet, they failed to explain how one of the plans is "tiered" so the advertised deductible was not necessarily valid. I ended up living in an area where there are ZERO "maximum savings" providers, so everything I need insurance for is at the second tier. It made my choice of plans the MORE expensive choice, and had I known I would have selected a plan with a higher deductible/less out of pocket. When brought to the HR person and SVP of Operation's attention, neither of them had been made aware any of our plan offerings were tiered. When I complained to Namely (since i cannot change plans in the middle of a year, their defense was that it was in the plan details guide created by the insurance company - not their custom guide or presentation. There were no apologies, and no retributions or offerings made. They should not be licensed to sell insurance if they are not knowledgeable in how to explain the plans they are brokering. Further, updates to home addresses etc aren ever communicated back to the insurers, which is a problem.

It's an "all in one system" but that seems to be about the only benefit.

The UI / Facebook feel for remote employees to be able to interact/engage with each other

There is not enough space to list it all out. The platform is NOT integrated so do not believe what they tell you in the sales pitch. The customer service is terrible and we have had 4 or 5 account managers in 18 months

I would look elsewhere. This has been a two year nightmare. They just cannot seem to get it together. And their product upgrades are not in the critical areas

Honestly none. Namely has caused more problems for us than we had with ADP (which was awful. Namely is not integrated so we do a lot of duplicative work and if you dont babysit the platform, errors will come up later that bite you in the backside. We have had issues with EDI feeds to carriers, issues with Benefits enrollments, onboarding and their PTO module is a joke. And their supposed "experts" at the company cant answer simple questions such as "if a pay date falls on Jan 1 which is a bank holiday, will those funds show up on their 2020 W2 or 2021 W2? It took over a week of back forth emails and the person did not even know what they were taking about. Unbelievable. Even though the platform looks "pretty" - RUN!