ADP
More info
- Creator
- Henry Taub
- Released
- 1949
- Type
- Payroll and HR
- Website
- adp.com
American payroll giant that started doing the maths by hand in 1949 and never stopped — now it does it for tens of millions of employees.
Automatic Data Processing was founded in 1949 by Henry Taub in Paterson, New Jersey, as a manual payroll bureau called Automatic Payrolls — the "automatic" referred to the service for the customer, not to any computer. When computers arrived they became the business, literally: handling the payroll run that every company must do and nobody wants to build themselves.
ADP is today one of the world's largest HR and payroll companies, and it processes pay for such a large slice of the U.S. workforce that its monthly employment report is read as an indicator of the whole economy. That a company founded before the commercial computer is now infrastructure for modern cloud payroll says something about how stubborn a problem payroll is.