ADP TotalSource Review 2024: Features, Pricing & More

ADP TotalSource is an all-in-one PEO designed to help small and midsized businesses manage day-to-day HR tasks as well as strategic initiatives with the ongoing support of an HR professional. ADP TotalSource serves as the HR team for companies that don’t have their own or supplements a company’s existing in-house HR team.

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Rippling

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OnPay

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$40 per month + $6 per user

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Paychex Flex

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$39-plus per month, depending on company size and needs (6 month free offer)

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As a PEO, ADP TotalSource is your human resources business partner that helps you manage payroll, benefits, compliance and more. In fact, you get a dedicated team of experts that specialize in different areas of HR and your specific use of ADP TotalSource.

ADP TotalSource main home screen.

ADP TotalSource’s standout features are its team of dedicated experts to advise on or handle various aspects of managing your workforce. ADP TotalSource is also both IRS-certified and ESAC-accredited.

ADP TotalSource includes core HR functions, payroll, benefits and more.

Core HR

ADP TotalSource software is a source of truth for securely storing and managing employee data, electronic documents and a range of templates. With TotalSource, you also get consultation on how to:

• Align your company mission, vision and values
• Manage employee performance
• Optimize your workforce
• Administer an employee reward and recognition program

Payroll

Along with many of the top payroll software platforms on the market, ADP TotalSource helps you pay your employees accurately and on time with its complete payroll administration suite. You can choose to pay your employees by direct deposit, pay card or checks.

ADP will assign you a payroll specialist who can help you set up payroll and taxes. ADP TotalSource manages payroll administration and processing, including audit and reconciliation, deductions, garnishments, unemployment insurance and exemptions. This service is important to help keep you compliant with the ever-changing federal, state and local tax codes. It also calculates, withholds and files federal, state and local payroll taxes.

You can set up your payroll runs to monthly or bimonthly, but any off-cycle payroll runs for things such as bonuses will cost extra. However, cutting off-cycle checks to terminated employees will not cost extra. ADP TotalSource payroll syncs with the built-in Time and Attendance module.

ADP TotalSource payroll

Benefits

ADP TotalSource is the nation’s largest certified PEO with 722,000 worksite employees. This means it can negotiate Fortune 500-quality benefits for your small company to help attract and retain employees. Competitive benefits include but are not limited to health, vision, dental, commuter benefits, 401(k) plans and more. ADP also manages employee perks, such as retail, restaurant, travel and entertainment discounts.

The way it works is that you and ADP discuss plan options each year to find the right benefits package for your company and your employees while staying within budget. From there, ADP handles communication, enrollment, benefits deductions, carrier relations, employee calls and benefits administration for you. Employees can then enroll in benefits and add dependents using ADP’s mobile app.

View and manage your employees’ benefits enrollments and more from ADP TotalSource.

Time and Attendance

Time and attendance software is included in ADP TotalSource and syncs with payroll automatically, so your payroll specialist won’t have to navigate between two different interfaces. However, if you choose, you can integrate third-party software of your choice.

ADP TotalSource’s time and attendance includes a basic scheduling tool where managers create and distribute employee schedules. By upgrading to the Time Tracking & Scheduling add-on, you get more advanced, interactive scheduling features that enable employees to swap or change shifts and communicate about scheduling with their managers.

Workplace Safety and Compliance

Each ADP TotalSource client is assigned an ADP Risk and Safety Consultant who provides guidance and preventative measures to help make your workplace as safe as possible. To help businesses avoid legal costs related to labor law violations, ADP TotalSource compliance experts:

Administer workplace safety evaluations to identify workplace hazards
Designs solutions to help clients create a safe workplace and remain compliant in a cost-effective manner
Provide safety training to employees and managers
Give guidance on OSHA compliance and workers’ compensation claims trend analysis
Assist with compliance for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and laws regarding how to handle harassment cases

By providing EPLI and a legal defense benefit, TotalSource can back their guidance and help mitigate the financial consequences of employee lawsuits and claims.

This kind of support comes in handy especially for small businesses with production facilities and physically demanding work environments. For example, in the event an employee is injured, the 24/7 nurse hotline access ensures injured employees get the care they need. In addition, ADP TotalSource provides workers’ compensation coverage.

On the software side, ADP TotalSource’s Compass is a compliance tool that pushes notifications directly to your dashboard. These notifications alert you to any outstanding compliance action items that need your attention.

ADP TotalSource’s Compass alerts you to compliance action items to take action on.

Learning Management System

ADP’s comprehensive Learning Management System (LMS) administers online or in-person learning to employees and managers for:

• HR compliance
• Personal and leadership development
• Diversity, equity and inclusion
• Technology skills
• Health and well-being
• Customer service
• Risk and safety

In the dashboard, HR staff members and managers can monitor the completion status of mandatory training.

Reporting

ADP TotalSource comes with more than 300 pre-built reports for topics including payroll, HR, time, benefits or talent to ultimately help HR leaders make better and more cost-effective workforce decisions in these areas. For example, a business can better control overtime costs after viewing an online HR report showing month-over-month overtime trends by employee. Aside from the out-of-box reports, you can build your own custom report or have ADP TotalSource build a custom report for you.

ADP TotalSource Reports dashboard.

Analytics

ADP TotalSource continuously supplies you with and helps you make sense of internal and market data. This helps you identify trends and act on ADP’s recommendations on how to make your business more efficient and competitive.

ADP TotalSource’s Analytics also features customizable dashboards that visualize the data that’s most important to you.

Plus, it features four built-in storyboards for turnover, pay equity, retention and age-related workforce insights. When navigating through ADP TotalSource’s guided online demo, the Storyboard provides an overview statement of how your company is performing. For example, in terms of pay equity, it displays the number of compensation gaps in your organization.

From there, you can dig into details by clicking on the breakdown of pay gaps by gender and ethnicity as well as the estimated cost to close those pay gaps. The details will show locations, positions and specific employees impacted by the pay gap. The Storyboard also provides recommendations on how to go about addressing your company’s pay inequities.

ADP TotalSource’s built-in storyboards for pay equity, for example, notify you of pay gaps in your organization and how to go about closing those gaps.

Finally, the ADP DataCloud also provides benchmarking features that are based on up-to-date, aggregated and anonymized data from ADP’s U.S. client base of over 30 million employees. This dataset covers a range of more than 30 different pay and HR metrics and can help assess if your:

• Employee compensation is competitive
• New hires are leaving faster than those at other companies
• Absence and overtime rates are higher than benchmarks
• HCM investment is providing optimal value

ADP TotalSource does not publicly post its pricing, but it does specify what’s included:

• Dedicated team of experts
• HR information system to store and manage employee data
• Payroll and taxes
• Benefits
• Time and attendance
• Comprehensive compliance
• Limited recruiting features
• Onboarding
• Risk and safety
• Learning management
• Reporting
• Advanced analytics through ADP’s DataCloud Enhanced Insights and Benchmarking

This is not an exhaustive list, as many of these broad features break down into more specific included features.

ADP TotalSource offers the following features as add-ons:

• Global PEO services for employees outside of a company’s home country
• Talent package that includes full-service recruiting, performance management, compensation
  management, Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) tracking and talent management support and
  guidance
• Custom API integrations
• On-demand wage access through ZayZoon
• Wellness rewards through KrowdFit
• Student loan repayment program through Peanut Butter
• Custom general ledger
• Time tracking and scheduling
• QuickBooks Time time tracking
• ADP’s StandOut employee engagement tool
• Organizational development consultation
• Medical benefits abroad

One of the best benefits of ADP TotalSource is the guidance customers receive from a dedicated HR expert who will advise and assist you with day-to-day tasks.

Areas of support include:

• Payroll and taxes
• Benefits
• HR investigations for harassment and discrimination claims
• Time and attendance
• Talent
• Workers’ compensation
• Workplace safety
• Technology
• ADP MyLife Advisors to support employees
• Full-service implementation

Your team of experts is available via phone and chat Monday–Friday 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. ET. Otherwise, you can search the vast ADP knowledge base for a quicker answer.

ADP TotalSource also offers tools and consultation services for recruiting and onboarding.

Recruiting

ADP TotalSource offers features for recruiting, but some recruiting features are included, while others are accessible via the recruiting add-on. For instance, candidate skill and behavior assessments as well as background checks are all included.

The recruiting add-on gives you access to full-time recruiters, applicant tracking and performance management. Once you develop a talent strategy in consultation with ADP TotalSource’s recruiting experts, a Talent Activation Consultant will get your talent program set up in ADP TotalSource.

ADP TotalSource helps you construct a competitive job post by offering salary benchmarking data. Once your job post is complete, you can post it to integrated job sites, such as ZipRecruiter and JobTarget, to expand your reach.

The Applications dashboard provides data visualizations that show you your company’s current application status, the number of applications in each status and the sources of applications. Each candidate has their own profile where you can make notes, provide a rating and manage communications with the candidate.

ADP TotalSource visualizes the stages that candidates are at in your company’s recruiting pipeline.

Onboarding

Once an employee is hired, the software facilitates new hire onboarding and electronic document management. You can also use workflow templates to onboard an employee.

We navigated a guided online demo and saw the workflow take us through a series of steps. From this demo, we learned that the administrator must enter:

• Information about the employee’s role, such as title and salary
• Payroll and tax information
• Applicable time-off policies
• Employee’s pay class and other time clock information under time and attendance

The administrator can also enter the new employee’s basic personal information but can save time by having the new employee submit it themselves.

From there, you can assign the new employee one or more pre-made, yet customizable onboarding checklists. The onboarding checklist gives you an overview of new hires’ progress through their respective onboarding tasks. You can send employees reminders to complete tasks as well.

ADP TotalSource gives you an overview of new hires’ progress through their onboarding process.

From the employee perspective, the online guided demo walks the employee through a series of steps that they can perform from ADP’s mobile app, namely entering their personal information, completing their paperwork and selecting a preferred payment method. The mobile app can use the employee’s work address to display restaurants nearby as an additional convenient feature for new employees working in an office setting.

Employee Engagement

ADP TotalSource includes Voice of the Employee, an employee engagement tool, to administer surveys to employees. These surveys are designed to gauge how employees are feeling about their work and the company at various stages of the employee lifecycle. There’s no need to come up with surveys from scratch, as Voice of Employee comes with scientifically validated survey templates. 

With this data, HR leaders can:

• Make more informed decisions about how to engage and better support their employees
• Compare their data to peers in the industry, using benchmark survey results
• Track trends over time by department or location

Integrations

Some ADP Marketplace integrations are an add-on, while others are included at no extra cost. Custom API integrations are an add-on that costs extra, however.

	ADP TotalSource	AlphaStaff	Justworks	Paychex PEO
Rating
Starting Price	Custom pricing	Custom pricing	$59 per employee per month	Custom pricing
HR Tools	Included	Yes	Included	Yes
Payroll	Included	Yes	Included	Yes
Benefits	Included	Yes	Plus plan	Yes
Time Tracking	Included	Yes	Add-on	Add-on
Recruiting	Add-on	Yes	Add-on	Add-on
Onboarding	Included	Yes	Included	Add-on
Performance Management	Add-on	Yes	No	Add-on
Learning and Development	Included	Yes	Limited	Add-on
Employee Engagement	Included	No	No	Available via Paychex Flex
Reporting and Analytics	Included	Yes	Included	Yes
Compliance	Included	Yes	Included	Yes
Risk Management	Included	Yes	Included	Yes
IRS Certified/ESAC Accredited	Both	ESAC only	Both	Both
Third-Party Integrations	Included*	Unknown	Included	Yes
Mobile App	iOS and Android	No	iOS and Android	iOS and Android
Dedicated Expert	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Customer Support	Phone, chat, knowledge base	Email, phone	Email, phone, chat, Slack	Phone, support ticket
Learn More	On ADP TotalSource’s Website	—	—	—
Read Reviews	–	–	Read Justworks Review	Read Paychex Review

*Depending on the app, third-party integrations available via ADP Marketplace may be included or come at an additional fee. Custom integrations cost extra.

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ADP TotalSource vs. AlphaStaff

ADP TotalSource and AlphaStaff’s features overlap, and both conceal their pricing. It’s even more difficult to ascertain what AlphaStaff includes and which features cost extra, while ADP makes it clear what’s included and what’s not.

AlphaStaff lacks employee engagement tools and a mobile app, and it doesn’t appear to integrate with third-party software. AlphaStaff does, however, offer unique Cyber Insurance protection for your company’s data and network.

ADP TotalSource vs. Justworks

ADP TotalSource and Justworks are comparable in terms of how they bundle certain features.

However, Justworks lacks some tools that ADP TotalSource has, such as tools and consultation for employee engagement and performance management. Justworks also offers a more limited selection of training options than ADP TotalSource, namely, harassment prevention and inclusion training.

The upsides of Justworks are its transparent plans and pricing and that it offers more convenient ways for clients to get in touch. Justworks also doesn’t charge extra to integrate with other software you use. Plus, Justworks has earned higher ratings on ease of use, ease of setup and customer support than ADP TotalSource has.

ADP TotalSource vs. Paychex PEO

ADP TotalSource and Paychex PEO are also very similar in that they include HR, payroll and benefits solutions and offer several add-ons. However, ADP TotalSource includes a slightly wider range of tools, namely, learning management and onboarding. In addition, ADP TotalSource has earned higher ratings for customer support, while Justworks tends to earn higher ratings on ease of use and setup.

ADP TotalSource is a good option for companies that need full-service HR and payroll support. While some users have reported that the software has a steeper learning curve compared to other PEO solutions, its dedicated support staff can help you with individual issues as well as strategic concerns for your business.

ADP TotalSource is best for:

• Companies with no internal HR team
• Companies whose growth and needs outpace their internal HR team’s capacity to perform routine HR tasks
• Companies that need a cost-effective way to manage HR-related tasks
• Companies that want to concentrate on company culture, employee development and employee retention

ADP TotalSource is not recommended for:

• Companies with large, in-house HR teams that can adequately handle HR responsibilities
• Companies that prioritize ease of use in their PEO software provider