Finance History | One ADP Boulevard — A Hundred Thousand Shares at Three Dollars

People treat ADP as a Roseland campus that prints payroll for one in six American workers.

The listed company was a Paterson payroll shop that sold a thin slice of itself on the New York Stock Exchange.

In June 1961 Automatic Payrolls merged with Automatic Tabulating Services and took the name Automatic Data Processing. Company-histories.com records about 200 payroll clients and fiscal-year revenue of 419,000 dollars with 25,000 dollars of net profit for the year ended June 1961.

On 12 September 1961 the firm offered 100,000 shares at 3 dollars each. That date and price come from ADP's own later recounting of the sale. The offering was described as a sellout.

Oppenheimer and Company, already a payroll client, took the company public. The same summer ADP opened a downtown Manhattan office to process brokerage back-office paper, the second line that would sit beside payroll for decades.

The mechanism is a service bureau selling a minority float while the founders keep running the machines. Three dollars a share in 1961 currency bought a claim on punch-card invoices, not a software licence.

ADP listed on the New York Stock Exchange that year. On 21 October 2008 it moved the same ticker to the Nasdaq Global Select Market and left the Big Board by choice.

The headquarters today are One ADP Boulevard, Roseland, New Jersey. The pin is the public entrance on that campus road.

Photo: Arild Vågen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street, where the 1961 float first printed.