The professional employer organization (PEO) you choose to serve your business can be the difference between a company that supports your company and helps it grow, or one that causes you unnecessary stress and extra work.
The right PEO will handle all your HR tasks, which will free you up to focus on pressing, overdue business tasks.
The wrong PEO will cost you more in the long run. Not only will it cost you more money than it’s worth, it’ll drain your mental energy, leaving you without the mental resources necessary to make sure you steer your company on the right track.
I assessed more than 900 different PEO services, conducted a thorough investigation of the top 15, then rated the top 9, which led me to identify the best PEO service in Kansas.
But before I provide you with recommendations, there’s something you should know.
The Best PEO Isn't Always the Right PEO
I’ve spent countless hours analyzing the 900+ PEO companies available in Kansas to find the PEO service with the highest score across several metrics.But the fact that it has the highest score doesn’t mean that it’s the right PEO service for you and your Kansas business.
- Some PEO companies have more experience with specific industries, so they can offer unique services and benefits geared towards helping business owners in those sectors.
- Some PEO companies have developed good relationships with health insurance providers, which allows them to offer you more benefits packages at better rates.
- Some PEO companies specialize in compliance and can offer you various products and services intended to make sure you meet state and federal guidelines.
There’s only one way to make sure you get the right PEO service for your business. You have to identify your business needs, then compare them to the key features of each Kansas PEO service. Doing this ensures that you’re not just getting the best overall PEO service, but the best PEO service for your company according to criteria that matters most to you.
If you’d like a free business analysis to learn more about your needs and circumstances, as well as a customized PEO recommendation for your Kansas business, fill out the form below and submit your information. Within 24 hours, I’ll contact you with your free business analysis and PEO recommendation.
If you just want to learn about which Kansas PEO companies scored the highest, keep reading for my recommendations for the best PEO services in Kansas.
1. Vensure — 9.45/10 (Best Overall PEO)
I chose Vensure as the best PEO service in Kansas because even though its services don’t really stand out for any reason in particular, it does a great job of providing those services. To put it in simple terms, the reason Vensure is different from the other Kansas PEO companies on my list is you’re not likely to ever have any major problems with its services.
Pros
Vensure provides all the PEO services and tools that Kansas business owners need:
- Human resources paperwork
- Employee benefits
- Tax withholding
- Compliance assistance
- Tax rates
- Payroll
- 401k
- Employee contracts
- Dental insurance
- Risk management
- Health insurance
- Workers’ compensation insurance
- Administrative services
- Employee benefits administration
- HR support
On top of that, Vensure backs all these services up with great customer support. If you have a general question about something, you can expect an email response from Vensure’s team within 24 hours. But if you have a more pressing issue, you can call its customer support line and receive a more prompt response.
One of the best aspects of Vensure’s features is that it has the technological resources necessary to support large companies, but it chooses to focus on small businesses.
This means that Vensure can provide support to your company no matter its size, and scale up no matter how big it grows.
Cons
The only real drawback to Vensure’s services is that it doesn’t do anything exceptionally well or provide anything to make them stand out.
- You’ll find all the services you need among its offerings, but it doesn’t provide any premium or exotic PEO services.
- Its customer support team is quick and competent enough to answer all your questions, but it won’t go above and beyond by doing something like sending you a birthday card.
- Its prices are low enough to be competitive, but there are definitely lower rates in the Kansas PEO service industry. Vensure will offer you a decent rate, but it isn’t putting itself out of business just to get you a good rate.
So while it provides good overall PEO services, nothing Vensure does will really stand out from its competition, and it won’t blow you away with its services.
Overall
Vensure earned the #1 spot and the title of the best PEO Kansas has to offer because it offers a full range of services to cover all your needs, and it does it all well. Vensure also has competitive prices, and it backs everything up with great customer service.
Vensure bases its prices on factors like how big your company is and how many employees you have, so to get a full quote for your business go here: Vensure.
2. CoAdvantage PEO — 7.90/10 (Best Customer Service PEO )
Don’t be fooled by the fact that CoAdvantage PEO is in second place. It’s still a great Kansas professional employer organization. It actually only narrowly missed the #1 position, and it even outperforms Vensure in one important area.
Pros
Like Vensure, CoAdvantage is a full-service Kansas PEO option that offers all the services you need. It provides insurance (health, dental, and workers’ compensation), onboarding assistance, HR paperwork, payroll management, tax services, and more.
It also has competitive prices and a system to get set up with that’s relatively easy to use.
The one area where CoAdvantage really stands out is its customer support.
I ran three separate customer support tests, and in all three of them CoAdvantage’s team responded to customer support emails in an average of 46 minutes. And the average time spent waiting to speak to a customer support representative by phone was under two minutes.
But its customer support isn’t just fast. It’s also incredibly helpful. The customer support agents were always able to answer my questions and sufficiently solve my problems without having to transfer me to another agent (or requiring me to repeatedly explain my issue to multiple agents), involve management, or make me call back later.
CoAdvantage hasn’t done anything to blow my mind, like send me a birthday card, but as far as I’m concerned that’s the only thing it could do to further improve my customer support experience.
Cons
The reason CoAdvantage isn’t in my #1 spot is that even though it has competitive pricing and a decently easy-to-use system, it fell short of Vensure.
Sometimes its system was confusing, and I had to call the excellent customer support team to walk me through navigation. And while CoAdvantage’s rates are good, all three quotes it gave me were about 10% higher than the quotes I got from Vensure.
These issues aren’t enough to be considered deal breakers for most Kansas business owners, especially for those who value customer support, but they were just enough to move them to second place.
Overall
CoAdvantage is a great Kansas professional employer organization option because it checks all the service boxes to meet your HR needs, it has competitive prices, and it has industry-leading customer support. Its system is sometimes confusing, and it’s slightly more expensive than Vensure, but it’s still a great option for any business owner who puts a lot of value on quality customer service.
As all professional employer organizations do, CoAdvantage bases its prices on a variety of factors, such as the number of employees you have. So to get a full quote for your business, go here: CoAdvantage.
3. Amplify PEO — 7.41/10 (Best Value PEO)
Amplify PEO is my #3 recommendation for the best professional employer organization in Kansas. It’s a dependable, solid option with great rates. However, it was a letdown in a couple of areas.
Pros
Just like the other two Kansas PEO companies on my list, Amplify is a full-service PEO option. You’ll get the health insurance and benefits packages you need, as well as compliance assistance, payroll management, tax services, and all the HR services and tools you need to manage your employees and tackle your HR problems.
It was easy to get started with Amplify’s system and its customer support team was more than competent enough to answer my questions, which they did in a reasonable amount of time, as well.
The area where Amplify really stood out was its pricing. I got three different quotes for three different fictitious businesses, and all three quotes were in the top three lowest quotes I got from Kansas PEO companies. The quote I got for my small business came in first place. I included every service option that was available from other Kansas PEO companies, which really highlighted how great these low prices are.
Cons
Amplify PEO has great prices, but there are some drawbacks to its services.
Like I said, it was easy to get set up with its system, but once I was in it, I ran into some navigational obstacles while I was trying to perform some fairly routine tasks.
To help me figure out how to get around these navigational issues, I called Amplify’s customer support team, and they answered me in a decent amount of time, and they were actually able to help me out. But they weren’t anywhere near as helpful and competent as CoAdvantage’s customer support team.
So even if Amplify is good at everything, it’s not really great at anything.
Overall
Amplify PEO is a solid Kansas PEO option with great prices. Its system can be a little confusing at times and it’s sure to pose problems for anyone who doesn’t have strong technical skills, and its customer service team isn’t as helpful or patient as CoAdvantage’s. But in spite of these downsides, it’s still the Kansas PEO with the best prices.
Like all professional employer organizations, Amplify bases its prices on a variety of factors (like your business size, industry, and the benefits you choose), so to get a full quote for your business, go here: Amplify PEO.
4. Justworks
Justworks is new to the Kansas PEO world. It was established in 2012, and since then it’s grown to provide PEO services across the nation.
Like all the other professional employer organizations on my list, Justworks is a full-service option that offers all the services you need, such as payroll management, compliance assistance, various types of insurance, and tools to manage your HR tasks. But it offers one feature that no other Kansas PEO does: transparency.
Justworks lists its pricing structure publicly on its website for anyone to access. This transparency is a breath of fresh air because the professional employer organization industry is based on obscuring pricing and forcing potential clients to participate in sales calls to receive quotes.
The reason that Justworks is in the #4 position is due to its young age and inexperience. The age of a PEO is vitally important in the PEO world.
The setup process to get your company established with a Kansas PEO is so lengthy and labor-intensive that most businesses can’t afford to repeat the process over and over again because they’ve chosen a start-up PEO that suddenly goes out of business.
I recommend that you give Justworks a few years to establish itself on the Kansas PEO market before you trust it enough to give it your business.
5. Infiniti HR
Infiniti HR is a Kansas professional employer organization that’s found a way to set itself apart from the other PEO companies on the market.
Infiniti, of course, offers all the services that the other professional employer organizations on this list do, such as a variety of insurance and benefits package options, payroll management, and other services and tools to meet your HR needs and help you manage your employees.
But it really sets itself apart by also offering employee recruitment assistance. If you’ve ever had the privilege of working with a good employee, then you know that their value affects the entire company. So the fact that this Kansas PEO offers assistance to help you find the right employees is a great bonus.
The drawback to Infiniti is the same as Justworks’: its young age. It’s only a decade old, which isn’t enough to fully establish itself in the Kansas PEO industry and prove that it’s dependable and going to be around for the long haul. So I recommend waiting a few years to allow Infiniti to establish itself before trusting it with your Kansas business.
6. TriNet
TriNet is the longest-running PEO in the industry. It officially launched in 1988, and since that time it has grown to include 16,000 companies and 330,000 employees under its corporate umbrella.
Like the other PEOs on my list, it’s a full-service PEO option that will check all the boxes and meet all your basic HR needs. But it seems to rely on its big name and reputation to draw in prospective customers, rather than providing quality services or unique products to draw in customers.
TriNet will never blow your mind with its customer service, it doesn’t update its services or innovate to solve existing problems, and it won’t work to impress you or gain your business because it knows it’s okay if it doesn’t win your patronage because there’s a never-ending string of customers in line to sign up for its services.
So even though TriNet is a dependable PEO option, it’s never going to exceed industry standards or blow your mind with its services.
7. Paychex
Another veteran PEO is Paychex, formerly Oasis Outsourcing. For the past 20 years it’s been providing service to small business owners. Oasis was recently acquired by PayChex, and while it operated under the name Oasis for a while, it’s now going by Paychex.
Paychex offers all the PEO services you need, as well as a number of industry-specific services. Some of the industries it targets include hospitality, education, retail, banking and more.
But the reason Paychex is so far down my list is its insistence on forcing new customers to sign 12-month contracts. The PEO industry standard is month-to-month contracts, so it seems really unnecessary and weird to immediately try to lock new clients in for a year.
8. ADP Totalsource
ADP Totalsource is one of the biggest PEO companies on the market. It provides service to businesses in more than 140 different countries, not just the state of Kansas. ADP offers the full range of basic PEO services, as well as a variety of unique industry-specific solutions.
One of the best features of ADP Totalsource’s services is that its customer service team is available to your employees, not just you as the business owner. This means that if your employees have questions about their benefits, pay, tax rates, or HR issues, they can call ADP Totalsource’s customer service themselves. This cuts out the middleman (you) and means that your employees will no longer have to come to you with these issues and rely on you to make the calls for them, taking one more menial task off your to-do list.
The reason ADP is in eighth place is that it has the same drawback as TriNet. If you’re a small business partnered with ADP, then you’ll be lost in a sea of other businesses, many of which are probably much larger than yours. This means that your company will never get the support and attention it needs from its PEO to grow and thrive.
9. Insperity
Insperity was an organization I had high hopes for, but it was ultimately a letdown.
It’s won awards for its outstanding products and services for the past 30 years, which certainly caught my attention. Then I found out it allows clients to cancel their service at any time (as long as they provide 30 days notice), and I thought I’d found an organization that prides itself on offering superior services and a great customer experience.
Then I found one aspect of Insperity’s services that changed my mind: health care.
Of course, if you’re a business owner in Kansas, you already know that health care is a big deal and requires a lot of options to get right. Your employees all have health care needs as unique as they are. So to make sure they get the best possible health care coverage, you need to be able to choose from several insurance and benefits packages.
But for some reason, Insperity only offers health care packages from one provider. Why? I honestly have no idea. I was never able to find an answer to this in any of my extensive research. It just does.
This means that if you choose to partner with Insperity, its limited health care options mean that your employees may not get the health care coverage they need.
The Best PEO for Your Business
There are over 900 different professional employer organizations available for Kansas business owners to choose from, so it can make choosing the right organization for your company a bit overwhelming.
I’ve spent more than 230 hours over the past six years conducting a thorough investigation of the Kansas PEO industry to identify the best PEOs in Kansas: Vensure, CoAdvantage, and Amplify PEO.
Though these professional employer organization options are great choices for nearly any Kansas business, to find the best Kansas PEO for you, you need a recommendation for your business based on the following factors:
- The number of employees on your payroll
- What you want the PEO to help with (payroll, HR compliance, workers’ compensation insurance, etc.)
- Employee benefits you want to offer to your team (such as health insurance and workers’ compensation insurance)
- How much you can afford to spend on employee benefits
- The location of your small business
- The location where you conduct your business (if outside the office)
- How much customer support you will need
- Your technological capabilities
- How large you plan to scale
- Your industry
If you would like to find the right Kansas PEO for your company, simply enter your details below and I will provide a free assessment of your company needs.
The Best PEO Selection Process
I used an extensive selection process to choose the best professional employer organization in Kansas, but before I tell you about that you should know a bit more about me.
Why You Should Trust Me
The reason you should trust any recommendation I make for an organization is that I know the PEO industry in Kansas better than nearly anyone else. I got my experience and expertise both through owning my own businesses and recommending the best professional employer organization companies for other Kansas business owners.
My experience started when I launched my online health business. Dealing with all the things I had to learn as a first-time business owner (such as building websites, writing articles, and managing my employees) was overwhelming. I didn’t have any time to deal with all the HR tasks and paperwork that were piling up and taking up so much of my time every day.
I initially hired a staffing agency to take some of the work off of my plate, but it wasn’t enough to solve all my HR problems. This eventually resulted in me partnering with a great Kansas professional employer organization.
After dealing with all the headaches that came from the HR needs of my online health business, I decided to take a break in between closing it and opening my next business—a cafe. To say that an online health business and a cafe in Kansas were drastically different would be a massive understatement.
But no matter how different the two businesses were, I still encountered one common problem with them: HR woes. This time I was armed with the experience of my prior business, so I set off researching the professional employer organization industry to find the best Kansas PEO. I combed through websites for information, read online reviews, and impatiently sat through lengthy pitches from sales teams when I merely wanted simple answers to basic questions. It was a lot of work and information to process. But all of my hard work paid off and I found a great professional employer organization to partner with.
It wasn’t long before I determined that I don’t have the right personality for the hospitality industry, so I closed my cafe and took another break to consider my next move. The answer came to me when my friends and acquaintances from my online health business and cafe started asking me for advice about how to get help with their back-end operations.
I made a lot of recommendations for different professional employer organization companies, which drove more people to me asking for recommendations. I eventually began to write down my recommendations. Since then, I’ve helped more than 1,200 small business owners in Kansas find the right PEOs to provide the kind of support necessary to grow their companies, which has given me more experience in the field than nearly anyone else.
How I Selected the Best PEO
This is the four-stage investigative process I used to whittle down a list of more than 900 different Kansas professional employer organization companies down to a short list of the best contenders.
Stage 1: Reviews
I conducted a thorough analysis of online reviews during the first stage of my investigative process.
Usually, if a Kansas professional employer organization has been in business for a year or more, it’s accumulated a great deal of online feedback from its customers. I used this feedback to find out which companies were worthy of further investigation and which ones I could quickly eliminate.
Using popular online review websites, I combed through reviews to find out which Kansas professional employer organization companies didn’t live up to industry standards in terms of products and services, customer support, and price, and then used this information to eliminate the weakest links.
Stage 2: Offering Analysis
Unfortunately, the professional employer organization industry isn’t one-size-fits-all. The types of products and services offered vary widely from PEO to PEO.
During the second stage of my investigation, I researched both the services offered by each Kansas professional employer organization and the prices it charged for them. This allowed me to remove any Kansas PEO that didn’t offer a full range of basic services or charged overly expensive rates for its services.
Stage 3: Speaking With Real Customers
Online reviews are a good starting point to learn about a Kansas professional employer organization, but they’re limited in two ways.
The first limitation is that customers usually only leave reviews if they’ve had either an outstandingly good or a bafflingly bad experience with a company. This means that online reviews are extremely polarized, with half of them singing the company’s praises and the other half violently condemning it. Because of this, it’s difficult to get an accurate idea of what it’s like to work with a company if you base your opinions solely on online reviews.
The second limitation is space. Most popular online review sites limit customer reviews to 200 characters or less, which is inadequate space for customers to leave enough information to form a strong opinion about a professional employer organization.
I decided to get around these limitations by speaking directly to real customers. I did this by reaching out to existing acquaintances and friends, customers I’d made PEO recommendations to, and visitors to my site. This allowed me to ask the customers extensive questions, and gave them a chance to provide lengthy and detailed responses. This information was enough to fill in the gaps and help me form a picture of what it’s like to work with each of the Kansas PEO providers on my list.
Stage 4: Speaking With Their Sales Teams
The last stage involved speaking to sales and customer service teams to find out how the companies handled criticism and negative feedback. This information is important to determine what it’s like to work with a professional employer organization on a long-term basis. Does it constantly seek to grow and innovate, or is it stubbornly stuck in its ways? Does it own up to its failures, or does it try to pin the blame on its customers? The way that each Kansas PEO company reacted to this less-than-positive feedback was quite telling, and it really separated the A-list players from the rest.
Ranking Factors
These are the five rating factors I used to find the best PEO.
Factor 1: Offerings
The first rating factor is offerings, that is, what exactly you’ll get out of each PEO.
It doesn’t make any sense to partner with a professional employer organization seeking specific benefits or features if that Kansas PEO doesn’t actually supply those benefits or features. So to ensure that you don’t wind up with a PEO that offers incomplete or substandard services, I created a comprehensive spreadsheet with each Kansas PEO’s services and its prices and then ranked them all accordingly.
Factor 2: Price
The second factor was, of course, price.
Kansas PEOs charge a wide range of prices for various products and services. This disparity is so great that it’s not uncommon for two different Kansas professional employer organization companies to provide the same services but charge drastically different prices for them. What’s even more frustrating is that most professional employer organization providers don’t provide their price information unless you participate in a sales call. So, I chose to rate each Kansas PEO based on its prices.
Factor 3: Ease of Sign-Up
The third factor I considered was how easy it was to sign up with each Kansas professional employer organization.
Some Kansas PEOs require you to fill out loads of forms and spend weeks looking for seemingly insignificant bits of information, while other Kansas PEOs obtain a lot of the information they need about your business from government websites, which takes a lot of work out of the onboarding process for you and makes the process go more quickly.
Factor 4: Ease of Use
The fourth rating factor I used was the ease of use of each Kansas PEO’s system.
It’s obvious to me that some Kansas professional employer organization providers have spent millions of dollars and loads of time to update their servers and provide their clients with productive, user-friendly interfaces. Other PEOs just add new features to already outdated systems and then write huge user manuals in an attempt to explain their complicated systems.
Of course, it’s far preferable to choose a professional employer organization with an automated, user-friendly system. So, to make sure that you don’t choose a Kanasa professional employer organization with an outdated, confusing system, I rated each PEO company according to how easy its system is to use.
Factor 5: Customer Service
The last factor I chose to rate each Kansas professional employer organization on is its customer service.
It doesn’t matter how streamlined and user friendly a company’s system is, you’ll still eventually run across a technical issue or have a question about its services. And it’s during these times that a PEO’s customer service quality really counts.
Some PEOs make you wait on hold forever before you’re finally connected to an agent, only for that agent to be unskilled, untrained, and unable to answer your questions or help you in any way, other than making a promise to escalate your concern to management (which usually doesn’t happen). Then there are other Kansas PEOs who answer your call lightning quick and resolve your problems within a matter of minutes, which allows you to get back to your workday.
The Best PEO for Your Business
Of course, Vensure is the best PEO option for many Kansas businesses. But it’s not possible for me to make a proper PEO recommendation for your business unless I have in-depth details about it.
Before I can make a good PEO recommendation for your business, I need to know things like what industry your business is in, how big your company is, how many employees you have, the type of benefits you’d like to offer your employees, and more.
If you’d like a free business analysis to find out about the needs and circumstances of your business, as well as a free PEO recommendation tailored to your business, then fill out the form below.
Within 24 hours, I’ll contact you with your free custom business analysis and PEO recommendation.
Since you’re here learning about business services, it’s a good time to learn about registered agent services, as well. A registered agent is a person or business entity that receives mail, legal documents, and service of process on behalf of your company during regular business hours. For more information about registered agents, check out my article about the best Kansas registered agent services.
Click here for more information on the 9 best Kansas PEO companies.
It’s also a good time to choose the structure of your business. You have several options available to you, including corporation, sole proprietorship and limited liability company (LLC). For more information about LLC formation, read my How to Start a Kansas LLC article.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to use a PEO?
The price of a PEO can vary widely depending on a number of different factors. This can include the PEO you choose, the services you use, the employee benefits you offer, and the number of employees you have. But on average, $1,000–$2,000 per employee per month is a good base number to start with.
How does a PEO charge?
There are two different fee structures used by PEO service providers: flat fee or percentage of payroll.
A flat fee structure charges you a set amount per employee. This is a good option for any business that requires a high level of certainty around their monthly billing.
A percentage of payroll structure is where the PEO charges you a percentage of the wages you pay your employees per month. This is a good option for employers in low-wage industries.
How long does it take to get set up with a PEO?
The setup process for any small business with PEO service providers takes time. They need lots of paperwork from your end and then need to file plenty more with government authorities to get you up and running.
This process can take anywhere between three and six weeks but on average, it usually takes four weeks.
Does it cost to change PEOs?
There are no specific exit fees associated with any of the PEOs we’ve recommended in this article, but due to the extensive setup process, every PEO charges a setup fee. This means that if you decide to leave your PEO for a new PEO, you won’t be charged anything to leave but you will have to pay the setup fee with the new PEO.
