Paylocity Holding Corporation provides cloud-based human capital management, payroll software, and spend management solutions for workforce in the United States.
The company delivers a comprehensive platform for the modern workforce. The company's platform offers an intuitive, easy-to-use product suite that helps businesses streamline and automate HR, payroll, and spend management processes, attract and retain talent, and build culture and connection with their employees. Excluding clients acqu...
Paylocity Holding Corporation provides cloud-based human capital management, payroll software, and spend management solutions for workforce in the United States.
The company delivers a comprehensive platform for the modern workforce. The company's platform offers an intuitive, easy-to-use product suite that helps businesses streamline and automate HR, payroll, and spend management processes, attract and retain talent, and build culture and connection with their employees. Excluding clients acquired through acquisitions, as of June 30, 2025, it provided its software-as-a-service, or SaaS, solutions to approximately 41,650 clients across the U.S.
The company markets and sells its products through its direct sales force. It generates sales leads through a variety of focused marketing initiatives and from its extensive referral network of 401(k) advisors, benefits administrators, insurance brokers, third-party administrators, HR consultants, and accountants. The company derives revenue from a client based on the solutions purchased by the client, the number of client employees, and the amount, type, and timing of services provided with respect to those client employees.
Strategy
The key elements of the company's strategy are to extend technological leadership; grow the client base; and expand the product offerings.
Products
The company's HCM, payroll, and spend management software solutions deliver a unified platform for the modern workplace. The company's platform offers an intuitive, easy-to-use product suite that helps businesses streamline and automate HR, payroll, and spend management processes, attract and retain talent, and build culture and connection with their employees. The company's product suite includes the following categories:
Payroll
Payroll and Tax Services – The company's Payroll and Tax Services solution is designed to simplify payroll, automate processes, and manage complex compliance requirements within one system. The payroll solution leverages data from the company's Time & Labor and Human Resource solutions to accurately calculate wages, deductions, and withholdings, without the need for manual reentry. Clients work with the company's experts to configure general ledger integrations, accruals, and complex reports to enable data-driven decision making. The integration capabilities also automatically transfer 401(k) information, retirement plans, and benefit files to third-party providers. Through the Tax Services solutions, the company accurately prepares and files the necessary tax withholdings and filing documents for local, state, and federal jurisdictions.
Global Payroll – The company's cloud-based global payroll solution enables U.S.-based companies to manage payroll for employees outside the U.S. in line with complex local and country-specific requirements across over 100 countries. It also provides consolidated reporting capabilities to efficiently manage a global employee base with real-time access to payroll data.
On Demand Payment – On Demand Payment provides employees with visibility into their earned wages in between pay cycles based on their hours worked and offers financial flexibility to employees through access to a portion of their earned wages before their scheduled payday without impacting the client’s standard payroll process.
Garnishments – The company's Garnishments solution provides the calculation, setup, and maintenance of historical deduction records and performs calculation validation against state and federal legislation to mitigate compliance risk and prevent costly penalties and errors.
Human Resources
Human Resources – The company's Human Resources solutions streamline processes using modern, mobile-enabled tools that help save time by automating administrative tasks and providing data-driven reporting. Clients can track headcount and status for positions, manage position and manager changes, manage compliance tracking and reporting, and employee data and documents in one central location.
Employee Self-Service – The company's Employee Self-Service module provides employees with access to their information 24/7, which allows them to view checks, request time off, clock in and out, update personal data, and collaborate with teammates. Employees can also enroll in benefits, view coverage, access training, or view course completion status on-the-go via the company's mobile app. An AI Assistant answers Paylocity-centric questions, as well as client-specific ones based on information in their employee handbooks.
Workflows & Documents – Workflows, the process automation engine embedded throughout the Paylocity platform, uses triggers and if/then logic to allow clients to automate manual processes, improving efficiency and data accuracy. The company offers both out-of-the-box workflow templates and allows clients to create their own based on business needs. Documents serve as a central location to securely store personal employee files, such as offer letters and performance reviews to help clients stay compliant and organized by replacing manual processes and paper files. HR professionals can search electronic documents and easily upload, store, and download documents while managing access with the company's role-based permission settings.
HR Compliance Dashboard – With the company's HR Compliance Dashboard, clients save time and money by staying up to date with new laws and regulations related to topics, such as employment verification, Equal Employment Opportunity, and compensation.
HR Edge – HR Edge supports human resource leaders’ navigation through complex compliance requirements, social issues, and HR policies. Clients can also access a comprehensive library of detailed articles, guides, and other resources to make informed decisions on compliance topics, such as healthcare reform, wages and hours regulations, employee leave, state laws, discrimination, and more.
Time & Labor
Time and Attendance – The company's Time and Attendance solution accurately tracks time and attendance data, eliminating the need for manual tracking of accruals and reducing administrative tasks. Employees and supervisors can request and manage time off, edit timecards, and manage schedule changes. A customizable supervisor dashboard provides at-a-glance visibility to missed punches, pending time off requests, attendance exceptions, and more.
Scheduling – Clients can simplify scheduling by leveraging AI-driven shift recommendations and budgeting/scheduling advice, leveraging templates, and building policies based on duration, time between shifts, and skills/certifications. Shift swapping and open shift claiming offer flexibility to employees, ensuring optimal coverage and controlled labor costs. Managers and employees can easily manage their schedules from the company's mobile app to ensure the appropriate shift coverage.
Time Collection – The company's wide variety of time collection devices include kiosks, state-of-the-art time clocks, mobile and web applications, and even smartwatches to meet the unique needs of different companies while enabling employees to clock in wherever business is conducted. Advanced features include specifying geographic parameters for mobile punch-in, answering attestation prompts, and other health and safety checks.
Talent
Recruiting – The company's Recruiting tools help clients find the right candidates by offering intuitive tools to streamline talent acquisition processes from application creation to candidate acceptance. HR professionals can reach more candidates by automatically posting to online job portals and enabling candidates to apply via QR code or text message. To promote an inclusive culture, clients can activate masking of certain candidate details to reduce bias. Additionally, the solution provides clients with the ability to auto-fill and simplify background checks, maintain and track personal and confidential data, and have real-time access to candidate information to enable timely staffing decisions. Scheduling is simple with Outlook and Google Calendar integrations and self-scheduling functionality for candidates, and recruiters can communicate with modern candidates in the ways they expect, including one-way video interviews and email and text messaging from right within the company's platform.
Onboarding – The company's Onboarding tools enable new employees to complete all pre-hire tasks through digital data collection to gather important personal and confidential information and documentation right through the platform. Clients can streamline processes such as handbook acknowledgment, tax withholding forms, I-9 document verification, E-Verify, and many others. Additionally, new hires feel an instant connection to their team and employer with welcome notes from leaders, introductory videos, company culture information, and company policies.
Market Pay – Market Pay provides real-time insights for HR, leaders, and managers, making it easy for them to understand their local market, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions about employee compensation.
Learning – The company's Learning tools allow clients to easily assign courses tailored to training their employees on new skills, policies, products, and other topics with a variety of course delivery methods, including on-demand and webinars, all of which are available via the mobile app. The clients can create a variety of content for their employees, including via a Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), embedded video, and various document types. Custom content is supplemented by a library of hundreds of out-of-the-box trainings provided by Paylocity in areas like anti-harassment, workplace safety, diversity in recruiting, and many more. Clients can also empower their employees to create trainings so that internal subject matter experts can share their expertise with colleagues. The Learning tools also offer numerous diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility courses to help ensure employees are educated to support a diverse workforce.
Performance – The company's Performance tools enable transparent, two-way communication, allowing teams to have ongoing performance conversations. With the ability to manage employee review cycles at the center of the performance management solution, employees can also manage goals and track their career development. The tools help facilitate ongoing, goals-driven conversations using Journals, giving employees a record of their tasks, goals, and accomplishments. Additionally, clients can prepare succession planning assessments across their employee population by using the 9-box tool that provides context to employees’ performance and the ability to visualize the distribution of their workforce.
Compensation – The company's Compensation tools help clients align between organizational goals, budgets, and participant eligibility in an efficient process that reduces manual effort and paper-based budgeting activities. The customized dashboards provide visibility to individual performance and compensation history at custom permission levels and the full value of an employee’s compensation and benefits. Clients can create employee-facing Total Rewards Statements in bulk to demonstrate the full compensation an employee receives, including not just pay, but also benefits, time off, and more.
Employee Experiences
Community – Community is an integrated part of the company's platform that streamlines communication and fosters a culture of engagement not possible with broadcast emails, antiquated intranets, or break room bulletin boards. Clients can support their employees at scale with Ask an Expert groups where employees can pose questions to designated group experts who manage questions from a dashboard. Community also offers premium capabilities such as one-to-one and one-to-many chat functionality to improve real-time communication; the ability to upload, create, edit, and share files; the automatic creation of team groups for supervisors and direct reports; updated user profiles allowing employees to list interests, team members, education, skills, or hobbies, and enhanced directory and search capability to easily find, follow, and engage with co-workers.
Video – The company's Video tools provide clients the ability to record, upload, and embed videos across the HCM platform to increase collaboration, morale, engagement, and productivity. Clients can embed videos seamlessly into tasks that are critical to their business such as leadership announcements, job postings, onboarding, performance journals, surveys, and more.
Employee Voice – Employee Voice helps clients automatically and continuously collect feedback that is indicative of employee engagement and retention. AI-generated sentiment summaries synthesize feedback alongside dashboards and heatmaps that make it simple to understand feedback at scale. It also includes the tools to share relevant insights with leadership and managers and create action plans to drive accountability.
Recognition & Rewards – Recognition & Rewards allows clients to drive engagement and retention via a frictionless experience embedded throughout the company's platform. Managers and peer employees can provide direct recognition and reward for outstanding performance and impact with monetary awards and digital gift cards, seamlessly processed through the integrated payroll and tax platform. Administrators retain full control and visibility into how rewards are funded and distributed, ensuring alignment with company culture, objectives, budgets, and policies.
Modern Workforce Index – Leveraging data from more than 41,650 clients, the company's patent-pending Modern Workforce Index (MWI) puts sophisticated AI into an HR intelligence dashboard that gives clients insight into employee sentiment, performance metrics, and engagement. With MWI, clients can identify gaps and receive insightful, actionable recommendations on improving their organization’s health by increasing employee productivity and reducing turnover.
Data Insights – With the company's Data Insights solution, clients can evaluate the health of their organizations with actionable insights in areas such as headcount, turnover, labor costs, and composition of their employee populations so they can customize, fund, and deploy strategies to support diverse employees and identify needs of underrepresented groups.
Reporting – Clients can build and customize reports within the company's platform. The company also offers hundreds of standard reports that clients can use as is or adjust to suit their needs. New reports are added regularly in response to regulatory changes, compliance updates, and client feedback.
Paylocity for Finance
Headcount Planning – Headcount Planning centralizes staffing plans, approvals, and forecasts into a streamlined process. Finance, HR, and hiring managers can collaborate in real time using customizable workflows, visibility controls, and dynamic organizational charts to track and update headcount plans as business needs evolve. With integrated analytics and automated notifications, clients can monitor budget versus forecast, drill down into specific teams or roles, open approved roles, and stay ahead of staffing needs.
Expense Management – Expense Management provides AI-powered expense reports with real-time policy enforcement, categorization, and compliance.
Accounts Payable Automation – AI-powered AP Automation automates every step of the AP process, from vendor onboarding and invoice processing to bill coding, approvals, payments, syncing to the ERP, and reconciliation.
Corporate Cards – Corporate Cards enable clients to issue virtual or physical cards with built-in controls and real-time tracking, while integrating with existing credit card programs to provide centralized visibility and control of all card spend.
Guided Procurement – Guided Procurement centralizes purchase requests with automated workflows to ensure compliance, efficiency, and collaboration across finance, procurement, HR, and business stakeholders, such as IT and Legal.
Client Support Teams
The company supplements its comprehensive software platform with an integrated implementation and client service organization with deep subject matter expertise. The core operation consists of various specialists, including implementation teams, account managers, payroll processing, and tax service teams. Delivering a positive experience and a high level of support is an essential element of the company's ability to sell its solutions and retain clients.
Implementation and Training Services
The company's clients are typically either migrating to its platform from a competitive solution or are adopting their first online HCM, payroll, or spend management solution. These organizations often have limited internal resources and rely on the company to implement their solutions. The company typically implements its product suite within one to eight weeks, depending on the size and complexity of the client. Each client is guided through the implementation process by knowledgeable consultants for all implementation matters.
The company offers clients the opportunity to utilize on-demand or in-class training designed to provide them with general knowledge of its solutions. The company also hosts an annual conference for its clients to allow them to learn about new products and features and to provide feedback and learn best practices.
Client Service
The company's client service model is designed to serve and support the needs of its clients and to build loyalty by developing strong relationships with them. Each client is assigned an account management team that serves as the central point of contact for any questions or support needs. The company also proactively solicits client feedback through ongoing surveys from which it receives actionable feedback that it uses to enhance its client service processes. The company has also built an online knowledge repository for clients that provides industry content and Paylocity product and service information.
Tax and Regulatory Services
The company's software contains a rules engine designed to make accurate federal, state, and local tax calculations that is continually updated to support all pertinent legislative changes across U.S. jurisdictions with the support of the company's tax compliance professionals. The tax service teams provide a variety of solutions to clients, including processing payroll tax deposits, preparing and filing quarterly and annual employment tax returns and amendments, and resolving client employment tax notices. The tax filing and compliance departments perform multiple audits to allow clients to remit timely and accurate tax payments. In addition, a series of audit routines are run to ensure that quarterly tax filings are accurate and submitted on a timely basis.
Clients
Excluding clients acquired through acquisitions, as of June 30, 2025, the company provided its HCM, payroll, and spend management software solutions to approximately 41,650 clients across the U.S. The rate at which the company adds clients is variable period-to-period and is also seasonal, as many clients switch solutions during the first calendar quarter of the year. Clients include for-profit and non-profit organizations across industries, including business services, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, restaurants, retail, technology, and others.
Sales and Marketing
The company markets and sells its products and services through its direct sales force. The direct sales force includes sales representatives who have defined geographic territories throughout the U.S.
The sales cycle begins with a sales lead generated by the sales representative, through the third-party referral network, a client referral, the telemarketing team, the external website, marketing lead generation strategies, or other territory-based activities. The company supports its sales force with a marketing program that includes seminars and webinars, email marketing, social media marketing, broker events, and web marketing.
Referral Network
The company has developed a strong network of referral participants, such as 401(k) advisors, benefits administrators, insurance brokers, third-party administrators, HR consultants, and accountants that recommend its solutions and provide referrals. The referral network has become an increasingly important component of the company's sales process, and in fiscal 2025, more than 25% of its new client revenue originated from referrals from participants in the referral network.
Marketplace
The company has developed a partner ecosystem of third-party systems, such as 401(k), benefits, and insurance provider systems, with whom it provides automated data integration for their clients. These third-party providers require certain financial, payroll, and other employee demographic information from their clients to efficiently provide their respective services. After securing authorization from the client, the company exchanges data with these providers. In turn, these third-party providers supply data to the company, which allows it to deliver comprehensive HR and benefit management services to its clients. The company has also developed its solutions to integrate with a variety of other systems used by its clients, such as accounting, point of sale, banking, expense management, recruiting, background screening, and skills assessment solutions.
Technology
The company offers its solutions on a cloud-based platform that leverages a unified architecture and a common code base that it organically developed.
Multi-Tenant Architecture. The company's software solutions were designed with a multi-tenant architecture.
Mobile Focused. The company employs mobile-centric principles in its solution design and development. The mobile experience provides clients and their employees with access to its solutions through nearly any device having Internet access. The company brings the flexibility of a secure, cloud-based solution to users without the need to access a traditional desktop or laptop computer.
Security. The company maintains comprehensive security programs designed to protect the security and integrity of client and employee data, protect against security threats or data breaches, and prevent unauthorized access. It regulates and limits all access to servers and networks at its data centers. The company's systems are monitored for irregular or suspicious activity, and it has dedicated internal staff perform security assessments for each release. The company's systems undergo regular penetration testing and source code reviews by an independent third-party security firm. The company uses multiple cloud hosting and third-party data center providers to host its solutions, including data centers in Franklin Park, Illinois, and Kenosha, Wisconsin (for backup and disaster recovery). The company supplies the hardware infrastructure and is responsible for the ongoing maintenance of its equipment at all data center locations.
Competition
The company's competitors vary for each of its solutions and primarily include payroll and HR service and software providers, such as Automatic Data Processing, Inc., Dayforce, Inc., Paychex, Inc., Paycom Software, Inc., Ultimate Kronos Group, and other local and regional providers.
Research and Development
The company’s research and development costs, including research and development costs that were capitalized, were $281.7 million for the year ended June 30, 2025.
History
Paylocity Holding Corporation was founded in 1997.
