Try to find a plain-language list of everything Paylocity does. The company’s own products page names each suite without explaining much. Third-party reviews describe four or five features and stop. And the platform keeps moving: since 2024, Paylocity has added two entire suites and an AI layer that most published feature lists haven’t caught up with.
So we built the map we couldn’t find. Every suite, every module, what each piece does, and how they fit together. If you’re evaluating Paylocity, this shows you what’s in the box. If you already run it, it may show you what you own and haven’t touched. And if you’re starting from zero, our guide to what Paylocity is covers the history, the pricing model, and who the platform fits.
Paylocity’s Four Suites at a Glance
Paylocity started as a payroll company in 1997. Today it sells a unified human capital management (HCM) platform organized into four suites: HR & Payroll, Finance, IT, and a platform layer of capabilities that run across the other three. (Paylocity’s site files that fourth group under “capabilities” rather than calling it a suite, but you’ll evaluate it the same way, so we’re mapping it as one.)
The Paylocity Platform Map
Three product suites plus a platform layer of capabilities — about 20 modules in all (2026)
HR & Payroll Suite
6 module groups — the core platform
- PayrollTax Services · On Demand Payment · Garnishment Managed Services · Global Payroll
- Human ResourcesEmployee records · Self-service · Compliance Dashboard · HR Edge
- Time & LaborTime & attendance · Scheduling · Time collection & mobile punch
- Talent ManagementRecruiting · Onboarding · Performance · Compensation · LMS
- BenefitsBenefits Administration · Flexible Benefits (FSA/HSA) · Retirement
- Employee ExperienceCommunity · Recognition & Rewards · Premium Video · Employee Voice
Finance Suite
5 modules — Airbase acquisition, 2024
- Expense Management
- Corporate Cards
- AP Automation
- Guided Procurement
- Headcount Planning
IT Suite
2 modules — the newest suite
- Asset ManagementTrack company equipment & devices
- Access ManagementProvision & deactivate system access
Platform Capabilities
Included with the platform — these run inside every suite above
- Ignite AI
- Mobile
- Integrations
- Workforce Analytics
- Workflows
Put another way: Paylocity’s features cover payroll processing, tax filing, employee records, time tracking, scheduling, recruiting, onboarding, performance reviews, compensation planning, learning, benefits administration, employee engagement, expense management, corporate cards, AP automation, IT asset tracking, access management, and a layer of AI, analytics, integrations, and workflow automation over all of it.
That’s a long list of workforce management features. The rest of this guide takes it one module at a time: what each one does, the sub-features worth knowing by their product names, and the note we’d give a client before turning it on. Evaluators can read it top to bottom; current admins may get more from jumping to the modules they own but haven’t rolled out.
Inside the HR & Payroll Suite
This is the core platform, and the six module groups here are what most people mean when they say “Paylocity.”
Payroll
Payroll is where Paylocity began, and it’s still the anchor. The module runs the full cycle: wage calculation, multi-state tax withholding, direct deposit, W-2s and 1099s, and the audit trail behind all of it.
A few sub-features deserve their own mention. Tax Services files and remits payroll taxes on your behalf, across every state and locality where you have employees. On Demand Payment lets employees draw already-earned wages before payday, popular with hourly workforces. Garnishment Managed Services takes over one of payroll’s most thankless jobs: processing child support, levies, and other court-ordered deductions correctly and on time. Global Payroll extends processing to international employees. Expense reimbursement also runs through the payroll module for companies that haven’t licensed the full Finance suite, so employees see repayments land in the same paycheck flow.
Worth knowing before you buy: the module’s real value is upstream of the pay run. Because every module reads the same employee record, a change entered once in HR flows into payroll without re-keying. If your current process involves exporting spreadsheets between systems, that single record is the feature you’re actually shopping for.
Human Resources
The Human Resources module is the system of record: employee files, documents, org charts, position history, and the employee self-service portal where employees update their own information, pull tax documents, and request time off. It also holds the administrative plumbing that rarely makes a demo but decides how much time your team gets back: digital document storage, policy acknowledgments with tracked signatures, and custom approval workflows for changes like promotions or transfers. A Compliance Dashboard surfaces items that need attention, and HR Edge layers guidance from Paylocity’s HR advisory team on top of the software.
The employee self-service portal deserves a specific look during evaluation. Every question an employee can answer themselves is a ticket your HR team never fields, and the difference between a well-configured portal and a bare one shows up in HR’s inbox every week.
Whether this module makes Paylocity a true HRIS is a fair question, and the answer has some nuance. We cover it separately in Is Paylocity an HRIS System?
Time & Labor
Time & Labor handles time and attendance, shift scheduling, and time collection through physical clocks, web punch, or the mobile app. Managers get overtime monitoring, labor cost allocation, and approval queues. The scheduling side covers shift building, swaps, and coverage gaps, with labor costs visible while the schedule is being built rather than after the pay period closes.
If you run an hourly workforce, this module decides whether payday goes smoothly. Hours flow directly into payroll, which is exactly where manual timesheet processes tend to break. Manufacturing, healthcare, hospitality, and retail operations lean on this group hardest.
Talent Management
Talent Management is five modules in one group, covering the employee lifecycle from application to development.
Recruiting is the applicant tracking system: job postings pushed to boards, candidate pipelines, and text-based communication with applicants, an area Paylocity has been building out with AI since acquiring the recruiting-automation company Grayscale. Onboarding moves new-hire paperwork online before day one: tax forms, direct deposit, e-signatures, and task checklists, with the completed data flowing straight into the HR record and payroll so first paychecks don’t depend on re-entered forms.
The development side picks up from there. Performance Management runs review cycles, goal tracking, and manager check-ins against templates you define. Compensation Management gives managers merit-cycle worksheets and keeps salary planning inside approved budgets. The Learning Management System hosts courses, tracks completions for compliance training, and accepts your own uploaded content alongside off-the-shelf material.
Of everything in the platform, this group depends most on configuration. An ATS with no defined pipeline stages, or a performance module with no review template, technically counts as “implemented” while doing nothing for you.
Benefits
Benefits Administration automates open enrollment, sends elections to carriers through direct feeds, keeps payroll deductions in sync, and produces ACA reporting. It also handles qualifying life events, so a marriage or new baby triggers the right enrollment window and deduction changes without anyone doing date math by hand. Flexible Benefits adds FSA, HSA, and similar account administration. Retirement connects the platform to 401(k) providers so contribution data moves without manual files.
The carrier and provider connections are the part to scrutinize during evaluation. Ask which of your specific carriers have live feeds, because “integration available” and “integration built and tested for your carrier” are different things.
Employee Experience
This group is Paylocity’s bet that an HCM platform can also be where company culture happens. Community is an internal feed for announcements and conversation, closer to a lightweight intranet than a chat tool. Recognition & Rewards handles peer shout-outs and awards. Premium Video lets leadership post video messages instead of another all-staff email. Employee Voice runs pulse surveys and reads sentiment across responses.
The audience these tools serve best is the workforce that never opens a laptop. A restaurant group or home-care agency can’t reach its people through the company intranet, but every one of those employees already opens the Paylocity app on payday.
These features usually arrive as part of a bundle, and in our experience they’re the least likely to ever get switched on. If you own them, they’re among the cheapest culture tools you have, since the rollout cost is mostly attention.
The Finance Suite: What the Airbase Acquisition Added
In 2024, Paylocity acquired Airbase, a spend management company, and rebuilt it into a full Finance suite. Most Paylocity feature lists you’ll find online predate this entirely.
Five modules make up the suite. Expense Management handles receipts and reimbursements, with employee submissions in the same app they already use for pay stubs. Corporate Cards issues company cards with spending controls built in. AP Automation routes vendor invoices through approval to payment. Guided Procurement puts purchase requests through a defined intake process. Headcount Planning budgets positions against live HR data instead of a stale spreadsheet copy, which makes it the module where the HR and finance sides of the platform actually meet.
Why does any of this live in an HR platform? Because labor is most companies’ largest expense, and headcount decisions are finance decisions. Putting people data and spend data in one system is the argument.
For HR buyers, the practical implication is who to bring to the demo. If your finance team is evaluating expense tools separately, they should see this suite before anyone signs anything, in either direction. We’ll publish a full guide to the Finance suite soon; for now, know that it exists, because it changes what “Paylocity features” means in 2026.
The IT Suite: Asset & Access Management
The newest and smallest suite has two modules. Asset Management tracks company equipment: which laptop went to which employee, and when it’s due back. Access Management handles identity and system access, provisioning accounts when someone joins and shutting them down when someone leaves.
The logic of putting this in an HCM platform is the employee lifecycle itself. HR already knows the hire date and the termination date. Tying equipment and access to those events closes a gap that otherwise lives in email threads between HR and IT.
The Platform Layer That Runs Across Every Suite
Five capabilities show up inside every module rather than standing alone.
Ignite AI is Paylocity’s AI layer: an assistant that answers employee questions, drafts content like job descriptions, and surfaces workforce trends admins would otherwise dig for. Mobile puts nearly the whole platform in an iOS and Android app — for deskless workers, the app is Paylocity. Integrations covers the marketplace of pre-built connectors and the APIs behind them, spanning accounting systems, benefits carriers, retirement providers, and background check services.
Workforce Analytics is the reporting engine: standard reports out of the box, a custom report builder for everything else, and dashboards that track turnover, labor costs, and hiring across modules. Reports can be scheduled and delivered automatically, which quietly replaces a category of monthly HR busywork. Workflows is the automation builder that routes approvals and triggers actions across modules.
When a salesperson says “Paylocity has AI,” this layer is what they mean, not a separate line item to evaluate.
What Comes Standard and What’s a Separate Module
One distinction saves buyers a lot of confusion. Modules are things you license and configure. Capabilities come with the platform and appear inside whatever modules you own.
Beyond that, Paylocity doesn’t sell one all-inclusive product. Customers license a core platform and add modules, priced per employee per month, and the bundles vary from deal to deal. Two companies with “Paylocity” can own very different platforms: one might run payroll, HR, and time tracking, while another owns the full talent group, Employee Voice, and half the Finance suite.
That makes three questions worth asking in any evaluation. Which modules are in this quote, by name? Which of the features we just saw demonstrated are included, and which are add-ons? And what does the module list look like at renewal? You don’t need pricing knowledge to ask any of these; you need the module map you now have.
The same discipline applies to current customers. Renewal conversations tend to focus on rate while the module list rides along unexamined, and that’s exactly the moment to compare what’s on the contract against what your team has actually adopted since the last one.
The Modules You’re Probably Already Paying For (and Not Using)
A pattern we see constantly: a company buys a generous bundle, implements payroll and core HR because payday can’t wait, and never comes back for the rest. Community sits empty. Employee Voice never sends its first survey. The LMS holds one compliance course nobody has opened since it was uploaded.
This isn’t a Paylocity problem so much as a software problem. When SHRM reported on PwC’s survey of 600 HR and IT leaders, more than 80% said they struggle to get their organizations to adopt the technology they’ve already bought.
A twenty-minute self-audit will tell you where you stand. Pull the module list from your Paylocity contract. Walk it against the map above and mark what your team actively uses. For anything unmarked, ask one question: did we decide not to use this, or did we just never get to it? “Never got to it” is the honest answer more often than not, and that list is worth real money you’re already spending.
The symptoms of the gap are usually hiding in plain sight. If HR still answers PTO-balance questions by email, self-service isn’t rolled out. When managers keep schedules in a spreadsheet, Time & Labor is half-implemented. If your engagement survey runs through a separate tool you also pay for, Employee Voice is sitting idle in the same platform that runs your payroll.
Find the Paylocity Modules You’re Paying For (and Not Using)
The twenty-minute self-audit
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Pull your module list
Your Paylocity contract names every module you’re licensed for. That list is the map.
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Mark what your team uses
Walk the list and check the modules your employees actually touched last quarter.
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Question the rest
For each unused module, ask: did we decide against it, or never get to it? “Never got to it” is your roadmap.
Getting More Out of the Platform You Own
Mapping the platform is step one. Configuring and rolling out the modules is where teams stall, usually because the people who’d do it already have full-time jobs.
Some companies work through it in-house, one module a quarter. Others bring in a partner. Our Managed HR team runs clients’ Paylocity platforms day to day, and our Paylocity Implementation service builds out modules that were never configured right the first time. Either path works. What doesn’t work is paying for a platform and using a fraction of it.
The Map, In Short
Paylocity is four suites and roughly twenty modules: the HR & Payroll core, the Finance suite most feature lists don’t know about yet, a small IT suite, and an AI-and-analytics layer across all of it. You now have the full map.
Start with the contract you already have. Count the modules you own, then count the ones your people actually touch. The gap between those two numbers is your roadmap, and if you’d like an experienced set of eyes on it, we’re easy to talk to.
Paylocity Features FAQ
Does Paylocity have an LMS?
Yes. Paylocity includes a Learning Management System (LMS) as part of its Talent Management module group. The Paylocity LMS hosts and assigns courses, tracks completions for compliance training, and accepts custom content you upload. Employees can complete LMS training in the Paylocity mobile app, which suits workforces that aren’t at a desk.
Is Paylocity just payroll software?
No. Paylocity started as a payroll company in 1997, but payroll is now one of six module groups in the platform’s HR & Payroll suite, which sits alongside separate Finance and IT suites. Any evaluation of Paylocity done before the platform’s 2024 expansion into finance and IT tools was looking at a narrower product than what’s sold today.
What has Paylocity added since 2024?
Since 2024, Paylocity has added three major pieces: a Finance suite built from the 2024 Airbase acquisition (expense management, corporate cards, and AP automation), an IT suite covering asset and access management, and Ignite AI, an assistant layer that works across every Paylocity module. Reviews and feature lists published before the Airbase acquisition don’t cover any of the three.
Do all Paylocity customers get every module?
No. Paylocity licenses modules individually and in bundles, so your contract determines which modules your company owns. Your Paylocity account manager can produce your company’s current module list on request, and comparing that list against the modules your team actually uses is worth doing before any renewal conversation.
