NewTech Friday: PaySauce – reimagining payroll for SMEs

 

Back in 2013, I exited a successful payroll venture after 10 years. My team had built that business up from scratch to become the market leader for small and medium enterprises in New Zealand, but it was time for me to move on. I had deep domain knowledge of payroll's compliance burden and a continuing drive to help the small business community with the right technology. Payroll is a critical function for businesses; it's highly complex, and it has very tight deadlines. Errors can be seriously costly, both from a regulatory point of view and in the impact on your employees. So, getting a wage payment late or incorrect is something business owners are very keen to avoid. 

 

Despite my previous venture's success, a significant portion of the nation's employers were still using either manual wage books or spreadsheets. These methods are time-consuming and almost impossible to stay compliant with regulations as legislation is frequently updated. For example, to provide all employees with a pay slip each pay period is becoming mandatory in most markets. Globally, the payroll space has long been dominated by a handful of very large players that made the industry ripe for disruption. Large entities have the resources to invest in a custom payroll software solution that works well for their specific needs, but a small business owner can't do that. 

 

In 2014, along with my co-founder Troy Tarrant, I recognized an entirely new opportunity to reimagine payroll and the accompanying business functions. We had found that the vast majority of existing solutions only made a small subset of the feature set available on mobile. We believed that a mobile-friendly solution was absolutely essential. We resolved to provide all the functionality that you get from a desktop solution on a smartphone. If I can book my flights, do my banking, and catch up with friends, why can't I onboard and pay an employee using just my mobile? 

 

We saw a market that had essentially just digitized a paper-based process built for the industrial age. But in the 21st century, most of us don't work in mines and factories - so why were we using a model designed for those industries? An Uber driver can get paid for the ride as soon as it's over, but as a graphic designer, I'd have to wait for the end of the month to be paid for my work. Why did we still have the concept of a "pay cycle"? 

 

It became clear that due to the complexity of payroll, payroll solutions tended to be one-trick ponies, only inaccurately completing complex payroll and leave calculations. This meant business owners were forced to combine their payroll software with a range of add-ons. Using different disconnected solutions for rostering, timesheets, internet banking, and then managing multiple applications, data sets and passwords to make their business work. 

 

Essentially, Troy and I founded PaySauce because the SME sector was poorly served, and there was a massive opportunity for us to provide the market with an innovative solution. Business owners can access a range of simple, intuitive solutions in their personal lives. Still, to take care of their staff, they're forced to use clunky, outdated, and complex systems. We wanted to provide a comprehensive, flexible, mobile solution that would leverage the best technology to transform employers and employees' experience.

 

Could you present PaySauce’s offer?

PaySauce offers business owners a single solution from onboarding all the way through to the final pay slip. We help accelerate and improve the hiring process with digital employment agreements. We enable employees to essentially self-onboard by entering their own details. Once they're up and running, they can make leave requests and submit timesheets from their smartphones. Plus, they can see when they've been rostered on to work, all via the employee mobile app. 
 
When the employer needs to run a pay, we facilitate payments with direct connections to employee bank accounts. Payment time ranges from instant to within the hour. And then, we take care of employer obligations with New Zealand's tax department, making their payments and filing their required reporting. We also offer employees a flexible payday on-demand with the option to access their earned wages at any time, without needing to integrate with outside solutions. Customers are looking for ease of use but knowing the compliance boxes have been ticked is also important. 

 

Essentially, we handle the people part of the business without requiring customers to juggle other "add-on" applications. This makes it simpler for every person in the company, saving time, increasing flexibility and providing peace of mind to the employer. With PaySauce, the HR administrative functions required to keep a business running become faster, slicker, stress-free, and straightforward.

 

What’s coming next for PaySauce?
 
We've just launched PayNow, our earned wage access feature, in partnership with BNZ, a major New Zealand bank. We have facilitated a financial link between the bank and the employee entirely independent of the employer. We take care of the employee accessing the earned wage component they need prior to payday and on payday we facilitate the transfer of the amount back to the bank. There is no burden placed on the employer but is able to have an employee who is happier and not vulnerable to be preyed upon. Not only are we incredibly proud of this feature, but it proves once again that we're a whole lot more than just another payroll application. We're a unique fintech platform, creating change for not only employers but also employees. We intend to continue rapidly evolving the PaySauce platform to connect and inform people at work in bigger and better ways. The key to our success has been a determined focus on solving business problems associated with payroll, approaching this from both the employer and employee perspectives. We're confident that PaySauce can become the definitive technology solution to take care of the human side of business operations. 

 

Right now, we see so many areas to maximize time and efficiency. We proactively seek customer input in our design and feature development, and we're committed to solving genuine problems. Our new rostering solution, released in March of this year, is a prime example, designed in close collaboration with our customers. After release, we immediately sought feedback from customers. In less than a month, we have been able to ship an improved version of Rosters based on direct customer feedback. We'll continue to be guided by the real people who use our software. We believe this is essential in maintaining and improving our customer happiness, reflected by an NPS of 72. The next move is to make individual components, like rostering or timesheets, available on a stand-alone basis, the same way we do currently with employment contracts. Ultimately, we're preparing to leverage both the technology and intellectual property we've developed in New Zealand to enter international markets, realizing our ambition of becoming a global player.