The PEO We Use at AllBusiness.com

TriNet, which we've been using for about 18 months, is everything a PEO could be, according to Trisha Merriam, AllBusiness Product Manager/Partners, who manages the relationship.

TriNet handles all our HR, payroll, and workers comp. Trisha spends only about one hour per month on payroll, just doing things like entering people's days off. To get new employees set up takes about an hour per new hire. TriNet handles all the day-to-day stuff, plus they provide a legal team and a crisis management team.

Our employees accept the PEO because people in Silicon Valley are already familiar with TriNet — a good number of our employees already have experience with TriNet — and people in this area are also comfortable with a Web-based solution like this.

Issues? Their Web site is horribly slow — everyone complains about it, though as we were going to press they were just launching a redesign of their site, which we hope will fix that problem. We're not happy with the reporting capabilities of their systems — they have canned reports, but it's hard to do customized reports. We were surprised that initially TriNet only offered insurance through one provider — HealthNet. This recently changed, and now you can choose from several different levels of coverage through a couple different providers.

There was a time when we were not happy with their account manager, who never never returned our calls. But TriNet fixed that.

On the plus side, TriNet offers all sorts of extra benefits: legal assistance, counseling (employee assistance program), commuter benefits, even discount tickets to Disneyland. These are things that would take a lot of time for us to manage in house, plus they would be added costs.

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