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Many small business owners want to keep critical HR functions under the same roof. Paychex is a great employee retirement vendor for such businesses, offering HR, payroll and employee benefits services, as well as integration with 401(k) plans. With Paychex, business owners can choose their own 401(k) plan, IRA, 403(b) and investment options to offer employees. Business owners can work with their preferred financial advisor or Paychex’s sales and service teams on plan design. Paychex makes it easy to set up your plan and integrate with automated payroll to handle employee enrollment and contributions.
9.2 / 10
Paychex’s reputation as one of the best employee retirement plan providers is well-deserved. The brand offers a great all-in-one solution that includes HR, payroll and employee benefits, in addition to retirement account administration and recordkeeping. Like prominent competitor ADP, the company provides a full menu of options so you can choose which Paychex features you’d like.
Paychex offers a variety of plans ( including traditional 401(k) plans, solo 401(k) plans and SIMPLE IRAs) — especially compared to employee retirement providers. For example, Guideline only offers safe harbor 401(k) plans while Perfect401(k) only offers traditional 401(k) plans. This makes Paychex the ideal solution for businesses seeking a variety of retirement plans/options.
With Paychex, employers can build a 401(k) plan that includes recordkeeping, administration or plan design – or any combination of those features – including recordkeeper-only services and stand-alone third-party administration.
Paychex users can also bundle health benefits, payroll and HR services, as well as outsource services to a full-service professional employer organization (PEO). A company representative told us that 91% to 92% of the company’s employee retirement customers also use Paychex for payroll. In fact, Paychex is also one of our picks for best payroll services. That being said, we find this to be an attractive solution for employers who already use Paychex for their HR and payroll needs, as the integrations are simple and convenient.
Paychex customers can choose from several types of retirement plans, including traditional 401(k) plans, solo 401(k) plans and SIMPLE IRAs. Each of these plans has its own rules and regulations, as determined by the IRS.
Pooled Employer 401(k) Plan: Employers can pool assets into one large plan and maximize their tax-deferred savings.
Employers that use Paychex to provide employee retirement benefits get access to thousands of investment options. However, these investments depend on the offerings of individual financial advisors and are therefore not described on the Paychex website. This makes Paychex less transparent about investment options than ShareBuilder 401k and Human Interest, both of which publicly list all their available options.
The Paychex platform makes it easy for employees to select their allocations in equity and bonds. It’s also easy to adjust your contributions per paycheck based on your retirement goals. However, because most Paychex plans are designed by financial advisors, it’s unclear how flexible Paychex is in including investments such as individual securities or stock in private companies.
Paychex does not publish its retirement benefit pricing on its website, which is another mark against Paychex on the transparency front. Other vendors we reviewed, including American 401k, publicly and clearly list their prices.
Instead, Paychex pricing depends on a business’s customized retirement plan and the other Paychex services the business uses. You’ll pay a monthly administration fee alongside a per-employee cost. There will also be a one-time setup fee. All these fees are standard with employee retirement vendors.
If your business already uses Paychex to process payroll, contact your account representative to get a quote for retirement services. You can also get a quote by submitting a request through the website or by using the online chat option. Alternatively, you can contact the Paychex sales team via phone.
A dedicated group of Paychex employees will assist you with onboarding after a sales rep guides you through signup. We found nothing especially complicated about this process in our research, as is the case with most employee retirement platforms’ setup.
The services an employer chooses from Paychex also determine the platform’s overall ease of use. Business owners who opt for comprehensive recordkeeping and administration will experience more streamlined onboarding and long-term plan administration. No matter what, Paychex empowers employees to near-automatically adjust their investments to earn them enough money for retirement.
Employers can contact Paychex about retirement services by phone Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET. Users can also email the support team, access their Paychex Flex account online, or chat live with a representative. Employees who need help with retirement services can view a selection of frequently asked questions online, or they can access their Paychex Flex account and chat live with a representative.
In spite of these resources, some current Paychex users report a lack of coordination between support representatives in different service areas. Similarly, Paychex is one of few employee retirement vendors we reviewed that doesn’t highlight its phone number toward the top of its website. You can scroll to the bottom to find this number, but even there, customer service hours aren’t listed; we obtained them through a company representative.
Paychex isn’t transparent about its pricing, whereas many of our top picks explicitly state their pricing on their websites. This is partially due to Paychex’s highly customizable nature and the extent and number of services the brand offers. But for employers who need price information from the get-go, Paychex may be an imperfect fit.
We also weren’t impressed with the user interface when we tested Paychex’s dashboard. Though the interface is navigable, it feels outdated compared to the crisp, clean dashboards of competitors such as Human Interest and ShareBuilder 401k. We expected more on this front from a legacy brand like Paychex.
Paychex also diverges from Human Interest and ShareBuilder 401k in that the company doesn’t publicly state its investment options. To give the brand credit where it’s due, the employee dashboard does make it easy to change your balance of equity and bonds. But Paychex lacks a table of investments on par with the robust information that Human Interest and ShareBuilder 401k provide.
To figure out our best pick for all-in-one employee retirement vendor, we researched plan providers known for offering a variety of services. Many small business owners lack the time to oversee separate retirement, payroll, HR and employee benefits services. That’s why all-in-one solutions can be so make-or-break for business owners.
We looked at employee retirement plan vendors that specialize in these particular services. We sought statistics on how many of these companies’ retirement plan customers also used them for other services. To rank as our top all-in-one pick, the vendor needed to couple this high all-in-one usage rate with clear information about its additional services. Paychex hit all these marks.
We recommend Paychex for …
We don’t recommend Paychex for …
Dock Treece also contributed to this article.