Paycor Review: Is It Right for Your Business?

Paycor is a payroll and HR solution that works well for companies wanting all of their software in one system. It provides tax and compliance support, onboarding, time tracking, and tools to help retain employees. Its plans are tiered for growing companies, and pricing starts at $99 monthly.

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What We Recommend Paycor For

Paycor earned a spot in our top picks for payroll software. It provides powerful HR tools for companies that want integrated payroll and HR services. Its small business product offers basic payroll and tax processing, while its human capital management (HCM) product has more advanced HR tools—like compliance support, recruiting and onboarding, training and retention, and reporting and analytics.

In short, Paycor is best for:

• Businesses with complex payment processing needs: Paycor can support a wide variety of payment processing functions, such as managing garnishments, child support, 401(k), benefits, and tax deductions. It also provides a dedicated certified HR professional you can consult with if you sign up for its Complete plan.
• Companies with 50+ employees: Past the 50-employee mark, companies have a bigger need for the integrated HR and payroll support that Paycor provides. Automated time tracking and ACA reporting for health benefits are essential and come fully integrated into Paycor’s system.
• Companies needing to upgrade from a manual payroll system as they increase hiring: Growing companies can save time and effort by using its HCM suite that comes with automated recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training tools. It also supports online signatures for enrollments, taxes, and employment agreements.

When Paycor Would Not Be a Good Fit

• Budget-conscious businesses that have fewer than 40 employees and need advanced features: Paycor’s Small Business plans, which have costs suitable for budget-conscious businesses, don’t have advanced HR tools—such as 401(k) provider integration, e-signatures, HR experts, onboarding, and 1099 support (some payroll providers include these in their lowest-cost plans). For more options, check out our best payroll services guide.
• Small operations that only need basic payment processing: Paycor’s price starts at $99 regardless of the number of employees or users, and companies just starting with only a handful of employees may be able to find a lower-priced payroll processing service. Check out our best free payroll software guide for more affordable options.
• Businesses with international employees: Paycor does not support global operations. If you have global employees or are planning to expand overseas, check out our top picks for international payroll services.

Paycor Overview

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Paycor Pricing

Paycor’s pricing scheme is based on the size of your company, the number of employees you have, and the features you want. It offers a Small Business plan (for up to 39 employees) and a Mid-Market tier (for 40 and more than 1,000 employees). The latter is custom priced and lets you select the modules you need, while the former has three bundles (Basic, Essential, and Complete) with monthly fees that start at $99.

The core of every plan and bundle is payroll processing, wherein higher tiers have additional functionalities—like paid time-off (PTO) requests and approvals, custom reporting, and dedicated support from a certified HR professional. For its Small Business bundles, you have to pay extra if you want the following HR features.

• Recruiting and applicant tracking: $399 monthly
• Benefits administration: $99 monthly
• Onboarding: $59 monthly
• Talent development and compensation planning: Each costs $49 monthly
• HR software and pulse surveys: Each costs $49 monthly
• Time tracking: $39 monthly
• Wage garnishments: $29 monthly
• Scheduling: $19 monthly (you have to get time tracking before you can purchase this)
• Learning management system (LMS): $3 monthly

Paycor Features

Paycor offers a comprehensive suite of HR, time tracking, and payroll processing solutions. Depending on your needs, you can create a customized Mid-Market plan or enhance its Small Business tier with add-on solutions for recruiting, talent development, benefits administration, engagement surveys, and compensation planning. It even comes with mobile apps (for iOS and Android devices) that employees, managers, and administrators can use.

Let’s take a look at some of its essential features to help you determine whether or not it fits your business.

Core Human Resources

Companies can better manage their employees using Paycor’s HCM software that includes payroll, HR, onboarding, analytics, mobile tools, and reporting. The core HR tools aim to help you create staff profiles and org charts, manage benefits and compensation, automate open benefits enrollment periods, promote employee engagement, and ensure compliance.

For attracting and retaining quality employees, Paycor’s compensation planning module is a good tool to streamline, automate, and execute pay and rewards programs. It allows you to run “what-if” scenarios to test the expected impact of compensation, bonus, merit increases, and benefit changes. The data also helps the company ensure pay equity and market competitiveness.

Further, numerous HR reports with customization options are available. Paycor even offers easy-to-run detailed reports for tracking employee turnover, pay equity, and benefits enrollment.

You can create and manage employee profiles in which all the data is securely stored online and accessible online and via Paycor’s mobile apps using controlled permissions.

With Paycor, you can easily generate detailed reports on overtime, headcount, and employee turnover.

Payroll Processing

Payroll processing and tax support are part of the primary functions that Paycor provides. These tools help HR and accounting teams accurately process payroll. It can handle workers’ compensation, benefits and garnishment deductions, W-2 and 1099 reporting, and payroll tax processing—from calculations to filings. With its multiple payment options, you can pay employees through direct deposits, pay cards, and paper checks. Paycor even offers check stuffing services.

What’s also great about Paycor Payroll is its fully customizable pay stubs and pay grid. However, while its pay processing tools are robust, it doesn’t offer global payment services like other payroll providers do (e.g., ADP and Rippling).

With Paycor, you can create a custom pay grid by selecting the pay data items and columns that you need.

Time Tracking

Companies that pay by the hour or need to track actual work hours of salaried employees tend to find Paycor’s time tracking solution useful. To help limit buddy punching and prevent time theft, Paycor offers employee time clocks that support PIN, biometric fingerprint, and proximity badge clock-ins/outs. Geolocation tracking is also available through its mobile apps. Other features include monitoring PTO requests, tracking overtime hours, and managing compliance restrictions.

Paycor lets you set meals and breaks settings, depending on labor regulations and your company’s policies.

Employee Scheduling

Paycor Scheduling is designed to automate and simplify the entire process of managing employee work shifts. It lets you easily create, edit, and share work schedules while allowing employees to manage their availability, swap shifts, and receive schedule updates.

Monitoring schedules by jobs or shifts is also possible. You can even place budget caps to control labor costs and add scheduling rules to establish minimum rest times.

With Paycor, you can set up daily and weekly scheduling rules to ensure that planned work shifts have the required break/rest periods.

Recruiting and Onboarding

Companies that are actively hiring and striving to market their company as a great place to work will appreciate Paycor’s recruiting and onboarding tools, which help streamline recruiting processes and ensure new hires are onboarded through an organized system.

Its recruiting tools include applicant tracking, job posting, candidate texting, remote hiring tools, resume searching and parsing, and automated offer letters with e-signatures. It even lets you brand career pages, run employee referral award programs, and track important metrics like lead sources and time-to-hire days.

Meanwhile, its onboarding tools help make a good impression on new hires and automate the onboarding process. It also helps HR teams gather compliance documentation, such as hiring documents and tax information. Most onboarding procedures can even be automated and are accessible from anywhere and any device—provided an internet connection is available.

Talent Development

Paycor’s talent development tools are designed to help you keep employees engaged and progressing in their careers. It automates the entire performance management process—from work goals alignment, setting one-on-one sessions, and collecting team insights.

Also included in this module are pre-built templates and trackable action items to help managers and employees develop performance and improvement plans. It even monitors company-level and department goals.

Third-Party Software Integrations

Paycor and its partner systems provide a wide range of compatible solutions, such as background checks, international payroll services, expense management software, and payment tools. Some of its integration partners include:

• Background screening: GoodHire, Assurehire, EBI, ESR, and Sterling
• Benefits: WageWorks, Paytient, and RestoreResilience
• Expense management: Center and Certify
• Global payroll: Globalization Partners and CloudPay
• Job boards: Indeed, LinkedIn, and ZipRecruiter
• Pay solutions: Netspend, Instant Pay, and Rabid Disbursements
• POS: Altametrics and Hubworks
• Rewards: Ignite
• Retirement: Alliance Pension, American Funds Premier Group, America’s Best, Ameritas, Ascensus, Blue Star, Truist, Fidelity, and more
• Time management: On Shift, ZUUS, and Deputy
• Workers’ compensation: AmTrust, Guard, and Travelers

Paycor Ease of Use

• Online and mobile access for admins and employees
• Simple to use with minimal training
• Easy to upgrade as small companies grow
• Phone and email support for all plans
• Helpful online articles, guides, and videos

Most users find Paycor simple to use, even with minimal training, and we found the interface easy to navigate and well-organized. Automation features save admins and employees time, while templates and workflows help streamline routine processes such as onboarding, payroll processing, and benefits enrollment. Branding features allow you to easily customize the software.

Top Paycor Alternatives

If you’re not sure Paycor is right for you, see how it compares with our top HR software for small businesses. And if you need help choosing, follow our step-by-step guide on selecting the right payroll solution.

What Users Think About Paycor

Users who left Paycor reviews online said that they like the payroll processing features and that the software is easy to use. Employees appreciate that they can sign into their shifts using their mobile phones and track their PTO, benefits data, attendance, and employee information.

However, several reviewers expressed similar complaints and frustrations about Paycor’s customer service. They mentioned that the quality of support seems to have gone downhill with them experiencing long wait and response times since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020—many comments before that time period raved about Paycor’s service. However, a handful of users said that they received good customer service, adding that the representative whom they communicated with was knowledgeable.

At the time of publication, Paycor earned the following scores on popular user review sites:

• Capterra: 4.4 out of 5 based on 2,067 reviews
• G2: 4.1 out of 5 based on 532 reviews

These are some of the trends we noticed when reading through reviews:

Bottom Line

Paycor provides easy-to-use payroll features that grow with companies as they hire and employ a larger workforce. It provides the features HR admins and managers require to recruit and onboard new employees systemically while also training and managing current employees. And, to help retain employees and improve productivity, it offers compensation planning, engagement, and performance management tools. The only services you may find missing are PEO and global payment.

If you want to learn more about Paycor’s features, then sign up for a free demo.

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