What has your experience been with Insperity (formerly Administaff)?

Our experience has been outstanding. To get the appropriate value from their services, you must take advantage of all the included services that incur extra costs with other PEOs (recruiting, on-site HR assistance, access to on-line and instructor-led trainings, and educational reimbursements). Your location may make a difference though. Our HQ is in Houston, so it is easy to get local assistance. In some parts of the US, however, the salespeople are the only ones on the ground, and professional services are offered remotely.

Admittedly, they are not the cheapest, but if given the opportunity, will work with you to add value. If your needs are simple, they might be overkill.

Good luck!

Just stay away from Robert Half or any of their organizations. The prices are far too high and the people who work for them are not all that competent.

I found Insperity's service excellent. We used them for payroll and their healthcare plans. When we used them I thought they did a poor job explaning their cost structure, but I understand that has improved. For us, the healthcare savings exceeded the cost of the service. I recommend them to others often.

Their service is the worst. DO NOT do this. You will be sorry.

I have used Insperity (and am currently using them) twice and found my experience and their service to be excellent.

My husband worked for a company that used Insperity. When he was laid off we worked with them for COBRA. They have the WORST customer service from an employEE perspective that I have ever experienced. If you want your employees to be treated like they are a "bother" use Insperity. If you want them to have their health care suspended because they only process payments on Tuesday and Thursday and then take 5 to 7 days to clear the payment use Insperity. They will not accept an overnight delivery. You can only mail COBRA payments to a PO Box. They make former employees feel like they can't wait to get you out of their system.

Insperity used to be Administaff. My company used Administaff, but we converted to ADP TotalSource 3 years ago, primarily because the annual cost for ADP TotalSource was about half that of Administaff, and because Administaff buries their fees among the cost of services provided and was not at all transparent about them. ADP TotalSource is much more transparent on fees, but also plays the shell game a little bit. Service from both has been very good, but like all vendors, they need to be managed and they aren't perfect. Bottom line, the service from ADP TotalSource has been just as good or better, and the fees are significantly lower.

As a referral agent for roughly 200 PEO providers nationwide, we hear a lot of the same complaints and concerns about their pricing structure and hidden fees. Having seen a couple of thousand quotes for services from hundreds of providers, they are the most expensive. But to figure out how much they charge on a per-employee basis, just check their quarterly filings with the SEC. They report that number (last time I looked it was $254 per employee per MONTH!). What do you get for that? A full transactional HR department and a subsidized healthcare plan. So their health insurance premiums look tremendous, but in the end, you are overpaying for their admin fees to obtain those premiums.

My client used them and I processed payroll and handled some HR issues through Insperity. The feedback from the employees was generally negative. Their healthcare plans are not very generous and expensive if you want to add dependents. I also had issues w/ trying to determine what the cost per employee in doing an analysis of switching from a PEO. Our dedicated payroll rep was very good and responsive. When we had HR issues come up, they were generally helpful. For the Silicon Valley, I don't think their benefit package was very competitive w/ other smaller companies so that's the downside.

I joined a company recently and discovered, after parsing into all the numbers and running a real comparison to other PEO's, that Insperity's admin cost per employee was $270 per month! It is very difficult to get them to admit to that number, until you have calculated it yourself and show them.

They make it very difficult to figure out your true cost and give people a false sense of comfort by giving you a percentage that covers everything. But it ends up killing you! Benefits are by definition a fixed monthly cost, not a variable cost that increases with someone's gross wages, so the total % approach is really bad.

So I decided to leave Insperity, and we took our admin portion of our cost down to about a third of Insperity's, with pretty much identical benefit costs by getting quotes both from ADP TotalSource and TriNet, ultimately selecting TriNet.

I have used both ADP TotalSource at a past company and now TriNet at my current company. I recommend both of their service, pricing, benefits, and online tools highly.

Insperity was way too pricey and it had a horrible online interface -- their whole business model is set up around customer service people that you pick up the phone and call. I don't want that to be the only way I can get things done. TriNet's paperless online employee signup, and extensive toolset which is built on PeopleSoft, has been awesome.

The other awesome thing about TriNet is that their billing is very transparent - so you see what their admin fee is, totally separated from employer taxes, benefits, worker's comp, etc etc. It was a breath of fresh air after the game that Insperity plays with their billing.

I have had experience with both TriNet and ADP TotalSource. About six years ago, we made the leap to a PEO after being frustrated with spiraling benefit costs. We had very good luck with the service provided by TotalSource and the benefit package options were far superior and much less costly than what we were able to obtain on our own.

However, because our compensation model is highly variable for our sales and field service employees, I also had a problem with the fact that TotalSource's admin fee is bundled with its workers comp and based on a percentage of compensation. So, when we had exceptionally large commissions, I was paying more for the same service basket.

We moved to TriNet because their prices were fixed, as described above. Upon our changeover, the benefit costs provided by TriNet were higher, but the admin costs were lower.

However, while their basic services were fixed, I found that they were fee based for all of the additional services. For example, pre-employment screening, special reports, salary surveys, training and education. All of these services that were included by TotalSource in my monthly administrative fees were extra charges by TriNet. In addition, at the end of year one, our benefit costs increased by a whopping 30%!! The communication on this was handled very poorly and there was no indication that we would be seeing that kind of increase.

As a result, we moved our business back to TotalSource two years ago and I remain very please with the level of support that I get from my HR partners there.

I recently requested a salary survey for a new position that we added and after completed a short survey and providing a job description, I received the results within three business days as promised.

While I believe that TriNet had a superior user interface and online platform, I am very happy with the overall value provided by ADP TotalSource.

As Dennis stated, I had heard horror stories about TriNet benefits increases. I think they went through some issues a while back but this is apparently a thing of the past. I did get a maximum first year benefits % increase in writing however as part of my agreement with them to avoid any first-year surprises.

As an aside, I did like the large # of plan options available to employees (11 plan options are available right now).

However, I too had heard that they kind of nickel and dime you on extra fees, so I am aware of that and have not asked for additional services (nor have I needed any in our case).

Our experience with Insperity was very good. However, their pricing is a bit of a mystery at first. You can get them to break it down to categories but you have to ask and push a little hard to get clear answers.

Realize that in order to get the full value for their services you will need organization commitment to things such as training, hiring, and organization development. If you don't get that you will not be getting your full value for your money.

We currently have Insperity and have now hired a CPA to look over the costs. They are costing us more than 20% per paycheck per employee. If we get a raise, they get a raise. There are many hidden fees. It is not worth the money and now we are stuck in a contract with them. Some of their staff is great, but it is not worth the money. We are a small company with 10 employees and are now realizing a that we made a huge mistake. The sales team made it sound really, really good when they sold it to us--their jobs, of course, are to do this, but it was very, very deceptive!!!

While I was at a prior company, we switched (not my decision) for 2013 from Insperity to Trinet for what we thought was better reporting and to some extent insurance. I didn't see the insurance as being any better and Trinet's reporting was a step backwards. Trinet does not allow you to see a payroll register (without special manual reporting that they only do in critical situations) ahead of approving payroll (...you have to approve payroll based on a report that shows you active employees with hours, but no dollar amounts). I would definitely consider Insperity over Trinet in the future.

Try CPEhr.com. Their services are fantastic. I was once a customer of Insperity and my experience was not so pleasant nor were they attentive. Ask for Lacey Hodges.
you will be pleased

Would any of you ever go back to NOT using a PEO? In other words, do it yourself.