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BambooHR Reviews: 4.5/5 — Highly Rated
For anyone looking to manage payroll and HR minus the stress, Bamboo HR comes with extensive features that include document storage, benefits tracking, time-off management, and an organizational chart with employee onboarding. The intuitive interface is easy to use for anyone who wants to get started with an all-in-one solution It also comes with built-in HR apps, compensation tools, and hiring and onboarding features. Bamboo HR can also deliver powerful insight into employee data, double data entry tracking, and numerous automation options.
| Capabilities |
API
|
|---|---|
| Segment |
Small Business
Mid Market
|
| Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, Mobile Android, Mobile iPad, Mobile iPhone |
| Training | Documentation |
| Languages | English |
The interface is user friendly. Customer service is responsive.
THe payroll functionality is lacking. I have to update several employees at the same time does not make it easy and updating in one section doesnt always translate so i am constantly having to update the same info in 3 difference sections. There is not a lot of automation, not a lot of integration with my other apps and most people do not want to use bamboo.
None
It gives the appearance of being a clean easy to use format. Looks are deceiving.
Their support. It is very minimalistic. Every issue gets the same response. "We don't know what is happening or why that problem happened. We will pass your concerns/suggestions/requests on to our development team/managers/round file." The software frequently fails, especially in communicating with the connected TRAXPayroll system. If there is an issue they usually can't diagnose the problem once the program is made it, it seems they can only fix a problem before you know there is a problem. Because their response is, well if payroll hadn't been submitted yet we could see what is going wrong. Which tells me they have really weak programers.
Actually they have been causing more problems than solving problems recently.
The interface is friendly and easy to use.
There are product that have a wider range of uses! It is limited and feels like a waste of money.
Employee Benefits/ Time-Off
I like that bamboo reaches out to me with reminders.
Finding things can be confusing. I dont like my picture being on the screen when inlog in.
Communicating with leadership.
It integrates with UltiPro so that was a huge pro for us using it.
The interface wasn’t very user friendly and their sales team is very annoying
We were looking for a performance review platform and we were looking for a new platform that integrates with all of our other systems
It captured all HR issues in one place..
It wasn't easy to use and we switched to another.
Workforce management
It has a nice clean interface. It has a nice color scheme
For whatever reason, bamboo HR never seems to calculate the right number of vacation days. This may be an issue with our the configuration, but it hasn't seemed user friendly from the configuration side.
We're using it for vacation tracking. We also store some personnel documents.
Nothing is so great that it overrides the AWFUL payroll/W2 corrections support, which is all but nonexistent. Cannot reach anyone directly by phone, and e-mails requesting assistance, updates, or identifying issues often get "lost." BambooHR is a joke. They also told us when they were pitching their services that we would have a dedicated account representative, which after we signed up and transferred all of our employees over to the platform, we found out was a lie.
Tax and W2 corrections support is terrible. They refuse to take any responsibility for the errors and are giving themselves a 60-day turnaround to fix. This violates IRS policy, which states once they are made aware of an issue, they have 30 days to fix. It's now mid-March and employees still don't have correct W2s! They also told us when they were pitching their services that we would have a dedicated account representative, which after we signed up and transferred all of our employees over to the platform, we found out was a lie.
Right now they're not solving our tax problem which is violating IRS policy and causing undue stress to our employees.
Almost nothing. Bamboo doesn't allow much customization. I guess the employees could sign documents but only from a computer, not their phones. It sends them a welcome email but isn't super customizable.
Everything! Huge issues with storage once we grew so the system would just stop working without notice. Employees had to have access to a computer to fill out documents. It has to be one of the worst HRIS systems on the market and it's definitely not cheap. Shopping for a new system immediately and definitely not looking forward to the nightmare of manually having to download each document under the employee's profile. I don't think I've ever been this disappointed in a vendor.
It's not benefiting me. I was told not to process my payroll while they resolved an issue. I couldn't believe it. No quick fix for anything and no warnings when things go wrong either.
The speed that they got us started at is probably the only feature that's best.
The speed of the customer support being able to respond to a simple inquiry.
They help with payroll and employees.
Good recruitment module! Easy to use interface.
During the sales cycle, we learned BambooHR has a very 'light' version of time tracking software, with no fraud prevention functionality. We were told we could use our current time tracking solution with an API. During onboarding, we learned that BambooHR DOES NOT HAVE a fully functioning API. What's worse? After wasting 2 months of time implementing Bamboo, we were told Bamboo would not refund our fees paid. Don't listen to their sales people. We are disputing the charges with our credit card. What an unethical company.
We are unable to fully implement the product. Therefore, no benefits realized.
Product Ease Quick implementation Very disappointed currently since we can't use the product
Inability to connect with anyone other than e-mail. Requested training several times and not provided. Requested new product demonstration and not provided. Pre-paid for 2 years and Billings dipped into our prepayment without our knowledge and then shut us down for lack of payment despite the fact that we are Health Care during a Pandemic.
I am currently trying to get Billing resolved. Looking to link with a new LMS and can't reach anyone to discuss. Asked to speak to a Manager or the President to discuss concerns and have not been provided access.
Works well for US PTO. Not hard to understand
- No option for adding international holiday *calendars* but US one is built-in. - No option to set different working hours per site (8 hours are NOT the default for EVERYONE). - Even if I edit my week starting on Sunday, bamboo still insists to call Sunday a "weekend" and make it disappear when clicking off the "weekends" on a timesheet. - Even when I make Sunday a weekday, if I manually add a holiday on Sunday, the system "warns"me that the holiday is collapsing with a "weekend". And last but not least, - Their CS openly writes - "we are a US-centric system", while your sales reps swear it's a globally fitting one. - No ability to generate reports based on events (like a salary history report with all employees with anniversary in July) - No Slack integration (and even using zaps \ webhooks, it gives a very minimal ability to only push out some of the data)
US PTO is very organized and well calculated. If you only operate in the US, it will give you the answer you need.
There's not much that I like about BambooHR, to be very honest. The low price point is appealing.
Many functions are like black holes; the system does a really bad job at notifying you of changes or comments on things you'd think you'd be looped into (like comments on onboarding tasks you've assigned). The integration with Workable is extremely basic and we have to do a lot of manual data input. Some of the reports are not exportable (such as missing data report). You are also not able to mass request updates - while you can see how many of your employees have not input their address, you can't edit or export the report. You also can't request they update it within Bamboo, making the report essentially useless - the only thing you can do is ask your employees to update by sending them an 'announcement' (nothing is enforced). The customizations are not self-serve and you need to reach out to BambooHR to set up. Strange functionality across the platform where things don't act as you'd expect them to or you run into snags. Support is spotty.
HRIS
This review is strictly for Bamboo payroll. Bamboo HR is pretty good overall.
Bamboo Payroll is not synced with Bamboo HR. Not only this, but also the specialists in Bamboo HR and Bamboo Payroll do not have any crossed knowledge for each platform. And everything they do is manual including manually entering each paycheck. There is no way you can finish payroll on your own, since you need to contact Bamboo Payroll for any changes. From there, your assigned the payroll specialist will send you the payroll registry in pdf. There is no excel report available. Now I understand why an payroll specialist is assigned to each account. It's basically a payroll service that they will enter all the changes for you. But you will need to tell them all the changes, and reviewed it once it's done. Because it's a manual process at their end, it takes average 2 days to get everything correct. And in the 2 days, there is nothing you can do besides waiting. We didn't get any payroll training until the day of actual payroll, and our payroll specialist told us that they are way understaffed so our requests will not be visited on time. And there is nothing they can do.
Payroll. We had payroll service with Gusto and they are great. The only reason we moved from Gusto to Bamboo Payroll is we have Bamboo HR for our HR side. We were under impression that once we moved payroll to the same HR system, all the info from HR will be synced to Payroll. But it's not the case. It takes us about half day to do payroll within Gusto, and now takes average 2 days with Bamboo Payroll. Everything is manual here and the payroll specialist is slow to respond. Execupay is also very hard to work with.
It helps greatly with performance reviews as well as goal setting across multiple sites. I like the fact you can blindly select people to review there peers. The functionality and concept of the software works great in a company like this but you need to work on getting the mobile app to reflect and have the same functionality on android iPhone and all OS's..
The mobile device functionality is not there. There have been several occasions that the vacation hours and announcements are different from the app, compared to the website. Sometimes the announcements don't even come through. I've also noticed that the the mobile devices operated differently whither it be an android, or iPhone mobile OS. I have not seen a difference in performance across the Opera, Chrome, or IE browsers but i wouldn't be surprised if there were some inconsistencies there as well.
Bamboo Hr has a serious issue with there mobile phone applications. On numerous occasions the app has has data both vacation time, requested days off, and company wide announcements not show up, that are on the website. This really needs to be addressed as a lot of people only have access on there mobile devices. Being part of a multi divisional office it does make communications, and reviews easier.. as long as they have access to a non mobile device.
We went with BambooHR so we could keep all of our payroll, benefits, and employee information in one spot. The UI is good, and for HR purposes it's fine. The applicant tracking system is pretty good as well.
The Payroll system(powered by Execupay) is absolutely terrible. BambooHR & Bamboo Payroll don't sync updates properly, and has cost our company tens of thousands of dollars. It's a constant mess, with no end in sight. We are constanlty auditing, finding discrepancies, and it's impacting our employees. Execupay is very difficult to work with, BambooHR would be better off cutting ties, and either building something internally(similar to Namley) or going with another partner.
The applicant tracking system is good, has saved us some time.
We chose Bamboo because there seemed to be a lot of functionality in the system. Really liked the option to add photos to employee profiles and the onboarding/offboarding aspects.
We’re still in the implementation process and thus far, the customer experience has been terrible. They have been rude, inflexible, and difficult to work with. In terms of the system, their ATS is quite clunky. There is also no e-signature functionality until after the employee has been hired (which they do not disclose during the sales process).
Onboarding, time off requests, offboarding.
Simple interface and clean colours. Calendar for the team works fine
Administering issues and several issues with notifications and requests make it sometime troublesome to use
Keeping everyone up to date with their time off
Originally, we loved the ease of the navigation of the system/ATS. It's attractive on the aesthetics side and easy to navigate overall. Training time for my hiring managers was minimal.
A few things: 1) It's almost impossible to get someone on the phone and their resolution on problems takes 2-3 weeks, with usually the response being that it's a "limitation of the system" or their product development team asks you to do research to figure out the issue 2) Reporting from the ATS side is non-existent as is the capability of the ATS. The limitations to this piece are endless 3) While they state users aren't required to use specific browsers and their are no preferences, certain browsers will not let you access the system via phone or otherwise 4) This system still requires a significant amount of manual work. No e-signature documentation.
We are growing at a rapid rate. We needed an ATS and HRIS in one. The problem is that this system only truly focuses on the HRIS peice and the ATS is left in the dust. Which, when you're a growing company and constantly hiring, is important.
