BambooHR Reviews

I assist companies with payroll and their HR departments use Bamboo to upload all the documents and information of employees. 

When I do payroll, I prepare reports and export them to an Excel format. I then use Bamboo to export the documents that I need and confirm bank details and other information about employees. 

Something that was difficult when we started using Bamboo, was the ability to import data in an Excel format. For example, we had one Excel sheet with half the information including first name, surname etc. We wanted to import all of the information into one database and this was impossible. We had to import it manually. 

If you are dealing with two or more businesses under one company name, it is not possible to transfer employees between companies if they have a separate bamboo set up.

In a future release, I would like to have an interface that can integrate with different software. This would save time when importing data to complete payroll. 

I have been using this solution for four years. 

This is a scalable solution. We have not experienced any issues. 

The initial set up can take some time depending on the how many employees you have and how many different companies you need to create. Our HR manager had one person working specifically on this project and doing nothing else for a period of time. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use BambooHR for announcements, tracking annual and sick leave and to view the calendar of the whole office.

This solution has helped our HR team keep track of everybody's annual leave. The calendar makes scheduling around team members leave a lot easier. 

I like the fact that the annual days are calculated automatically and that if annual leave is taken in the future, those days are put on hold. You always know how many days of annual leave are you left with and how many are on hold. Applying for leave is easy to do using BambooHR. 

BambooHR could be improved by managing leave in a way that transfers remaining days at the end of the annual year to the following year. Leave days at the end of a year are currently calculated manually by our HR team which is time consuming. 

We have used BambooHR for seven months. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. We currently have 100 users on BambooHR across our compliance, billing, operations and sales departments. 

No, we previously used pen and paper for requesting annual leave. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

Honestly, all of the features are valuable to me. When I came on board with Goodwill, we were using spreadsheets and paper files. At this point, with all new hires, I am able to keep their files electronically and get the information I need at a moment’s notice. The end goal will to eliminate all paper files within the next year or two and be all electronic.

This product has made my job easier in that I am able to be more effective when it comes to making critical decisions with staffing, promotes, etc.

I would like to see BambooHR allow for more than 10 jobs to be posted. I am sure large agencies have a need to fill more than just 10 jobs at a time. I would also like to see the system allow for more than three signatures on documents. Some of my documents I need five signatures.

I have used this product for six months.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10+!! They are outstanding!

Initial setup was straightforward. In fact, I was having my supervisors log into the system and become familiar with it before we fully launched it.

You cannot beat the price for this product. We shopped around and BambooHR is the cheapest around and they have far better customer service than the rest.

We looked at UltiPro and ADP.

Reach out to other organizations who are similar to you, and ask all the questions you have. That will let you know if this product is the right fit for you.

It is very user friendly. It’s easy to teach new hires how to use it. It is very easy to navigate features and show them how to use them, such as finding benefits they are entered in, PTO requests and training information. They can see what they have completed.

We are able to better track our employees’ trainings, PTO, etc. So we work much more efficiently.

Sometimes, the email alerts act funny and do not show up. If I put a new date in for, say a child abuse clearance, before the previous one is expired, it will not send an alert for the new date, but the previous date.

Also, when I send an electronic hire packet, if there are forms that the employee and myself have to sign, after I sign, it comes back in my email twice for each form. It should only come back once with all signatures attached.

Almost one year for me. Almost two years for the company.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

On a scale of 1-5, I would rate it a 6. Technical support is always efficient in getting back to me when I have an issue.

We did not have anything previous to BambooHR.

I was not here at the setup.

I did not handle that.

It is a great HR product for your business. It’s very easy and user friendly with great reporting capabilities.

We use this solution for employee management.

The performance goals and personal features of every employee with the dashboard is most valuable. 

It would be useful to have the possibility to assign a task to the different users within the software. 

We have used BambooHR for two years. 

The customer service for this solution is good. I would rate them a five out of five. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

Customers use BambooHR for leave management, onboarding, offboarding, performance management, and employee profiles. They also use it for benefits management, application management, and HR reporting. They have also just added limited time tracking and payroll to this solution.

Leave management is the most valuable as they all started with leave management and then progressed to performance management. Of course, employee profiles are central to everything.

It is also very easy to use. Customers get on board with it very quickly. One of the selling points for BambooHR is that they have a very wide partner network. There are lots of other partners that have integrations with BambooHR. They have an open API. This is one of the things that is driving its growth because lots of people and companies are literally just building integrations of BambooHR to ride the wave. If you have an integration with BambooHR, you get sales. People are more likely to choose your product because they've already chosen BambooHR. That's how it is happening.

It is a cloud deployment, so there is only one version. They do the updates every month, and because of this, you are encouraged to send them feedback all the time. You never know. Your feature may be included in the next release.

It would be good to include more options for approvals and workflows.

They are deliberately not the most sophisticated version of anything that they do, but it is like 80/20. They hit the vast majority of all the needs, but I have started to run up against the limits of their functionality. It has forced me to start paying attention to the marketplace or sending feedback to BambooHR. Clients are still happy though.

Timesheets is a new area in which they're slowly expanding. It is currently very limited, but it meets the needs of standard nine-to-five salary employees who just want to be able to key in their time, have it approved, and then pushed off to payroll. It does not have any of the bells and whistles that an hourly employee or hourly worker might need. That is one area that is currently limited, but they have integrations with some of the best companies that do that.

I have been using BambooHR for two years. I recommend this solution to the clients, and they purchase it. I then work with them in installing, configuring, and supporting it.

It is very stable.

I don't have very large clients, all of the clients that I'm aware of are up to 1,000 employees. 

They are very friendly and knowledgeable. They are growing really fast, so there are always new people coming on board. Because I have had to call in for different types of support once or twice, I have run into somebody who was new. Because they are new, you just have to bring them up to speed a little bit. We had fun. We got things solved and done. They are almost perfect. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

The initial setup is extremely straightforward. After you create a trial and it validates your trial name, your account is pretty much set up instantly. That's the full deployment done instantly. 

Once you actually decide to go live with the product, they would have an implementation project manager who will simply walk you through the process of uploading your data by using Excel spreadsheets, typically within two or three weeks. It is not two to three weeks of configuration time. It is two to three weeks of the company figuring out their own data. Once a company figures out its own data and policies, you literally can configure it over the phone. The hardest part of the implementation is the company figuring out all its own data and policies and the implications. It is not the software. The software part is fairly straightforward.

The first thing I would say is to go for it, but just give them a call because they are very clear on what are the things that they do and the things that they don't do. I would definitely say give them a call and interact with them and just use the system. You'll quickly see if it fits your requirements or not. Obviously, there is a slice of the market that it won't fit. I would say just try it because it is so user friendly that you will know quickly whether it is a good match for you or not.

I would rate BambooHR a nine out of ten. It is fantastic. Customers love it.

The 13 months feature is valuable.

It provides great applicant tracking and documentation for our needs.

It is good for keeping most of our HR functions online and available for our small and nimble office.

It allows us to share emergency contact information with fellow staff members decreasing the time to get hold of emergency contact persons if needed.

The performance appraisal system is too static and limited. It doesn't leave room for different questions other than those provided.

I have used it for 2.5 years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We only encountered scalability issues with the performance appraisal system, which we used for a while, then we turned it off.

We have only used technical support by email. If you can't put your questions into a clear format that technical support can help with, then it may be harder to get your problem or issue solved.

Most of our previous activities were performed using Word, Excel, and PDF documents.

It was easy to upload lists and employee information. Also, it is quite easy to highlight information you are collecting which is not standard.

We looked into others like Paychex and ADP. They seemed too large and bulky for our needs.

Use your network to find the best vendor that works for you.

• We can easily store all the information about an employee in one place
• It is easy to change and update it.
• I briefly used a different system, and it was impossibly difficult to change a simple piece of information such as who someone reports to.
• I find the ATS very useful.
• I like that I can create my own tables and tabs (although would be nice if I could do these myself rather than asking BambooHR to do it for me).

We have become much more thorough about keeping documents and paperwork properly, and ensuring we have the correct documents for everyone. It has also allowed us to report on things easily, e.g., sickness records and keeping a track of holiday.

• The time off area is still rather clunky. It is not as intuitive as other sections.
• People generally need to be shown how to use it. I don’t have the flexibility to handle sickness in different ways, and the number it shows for annual leave available does not show what people expect.
• I can’t do a point-in-time report. For example, "How many active employees were there on 1, Jan, 2017?"
• If I enter something with a date in the future, e.g., a pay raise, it makes it seem as if that is the current status quo. If I do a report of current pay, it will give me the number I entered with the latest date, even if the date of that is in the future.
• I’d like to be able to build my own tables and tick boxes (e.g., an easy way to check how many people have a signed contract).
• I am in the UK, but their support team works US hours.

I have used BambooHR for about three years, across two companies.

We had stability issues once or twice. The most significant issue was when there was an outage for a few hours and there was no out-of-hours support available. It was very frustrating, as I had no backup for all this data.

We haven’t had scalability issues, but I don’t think I would necessarily use it if I had many hundreds of employees. I feel like I have a fairly manual hold over it.

It is a very friendly personal service and they are responsive within a day. The fact that they are in a different time zone on the opposite side of the world isn’t great.

At my previous company, we had no previous solution. At the current company they had Cezanne HR, which was impossible to understand.

I frequently spent 40-60 minutes on the phone to their helpdesk just to sort out what happens when someone leaves and I need to change the reporting structure.

In BambooHR, this takes minutes.

The setup was easy, although it took a while to get all the links for uploading data.

Also, it was irritating as the date format was USA, so I had to reformat ours to fit in with theirs. Even though it displays the date in UK format for me, I had to upload it in USA format.

It does not recognize London as a county, however many times I ask them. I have to put in “City of London” as the county, which is not what people call it here.

Nothing in particular. Seems fine to me.

I looked at People HR. I also looked briefly at some others, e.g., Fairsail and one other, but the price was out of our league.

If you can talk to someone else about how they use it, you’ll get a good idea of the flexibility and what you can control.