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ZenPayroll (YC W12) Raises $60M From Group Led by Google Investment Arm
- papercruncher 12y agoSwitched to ZenPayroll from Intuit Payroll and couldn't be happier. ZenPayroll is a great product starting from the onboarding experience, to running weekly payroll, to their customer support, even the automated transactional emails they send out. Intuit on the other hand was so terrible, it actually cost us money because it buried some critical action items (local tax filing forms) under some obscure setting
- techtivist 12y agoI am curious to understand what it takes to move from SMBs to move upmarket. Any examples of companies that have made the successful transition without alienating its core SMB customers?
- misiti3780 12y agoI wonder what percentage of ADP/Paychecks business ZenPayoll has been able to siphon off?
- edawerd 12y agoWe don't know the exact number ourselves, but I can say that we do get a lot of businesses who are switching from ADP/Paychex. Here's a quick Twitter search that might be useful for anecdotal data-points: https://twitter.com/search?q=zenpayroll%20paychex&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=zenpayroll%20paychex&src=typd The majority of small businesses still do payroll manually, so we get even more switching from doing it themselves.
- hisabness 12y agoany reason i was denied access to your platform? during the underwriting i expressed interest in operating as a PEO. what is your companies policy for said situation? would like more transparency lest you all be accused of being religious freedomists. happy to provide more information offline. thanks.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- wdewind 12y agoIf you'd like to use the PEO structure checkout Justworks, we are a PEO and offer a lot of cool HRIS stuff besides just payroll and benefits administration. http://www.justworks.com http://www.justworks.com
- edawerd 12y agoZenPayroll is not a PEO, so we unfortunately cannot accept any company that want to operate under the PEO model. As I'm sure you know, a PEO technically hires a client company's employees, thus becoming their employer of record for tax purposes. Our model (like most payroll companies) requires companies to hire their employees under their own EIN for maximum flexibility and cost efficiency.
- hisabness 12y agoThanks for your response Ed. I appreciate that you're willing to respond here. It is my company that wanted to operate as a PEO i.e. we would be the employer of record for the employees of our client companies. We then hoped to use ZenPayroll to process our payroll. I was told that you all like to work with companies that have 10 employees or fewer, which is fine, but it doesn't sound like if companies grow past 10 employees you kick them off your platform. I think you all are a great company, and your colleagues have been both friendly and responsive in our dealings so my questioning isn't meant to detract from that. Thanks.
- limeyx 12y agoYeah I dont doubt it. Using ADP has to be one of the most miserable experiences ever. Not to mention their web page that looks like its from 1982 I'd toss them in a hot second if it was my decision. ZenPayroll worked great at the previous company ...
- mathattack 12y agoMy understanding is that a big source of ADP's profits is their ability to make money on the float. [0] Does ZenPayroll do this too? I suspect it doesn't make sense at the current scale, but could be part of their valuation. Payroll is a great recurring revenue stream. Even with these new entrants, most firms keep the same provider for many years. (I don't pay great attention, but I don't recall ever having a paycheck come from someplace new within a given company) [0] http://ww2.cfo.com/people/2013/04/how-adp-turns-payroll-into-cash/ http://ww2.cfo.com/people/2013/04/how-adp-turns-payroll-into...
- edawerd 12y agoWe don't do this, as we're currently just 100% focused on building the best product possible for our customers.
- e40 12y agoDo you have integrated timecards? ADP does that, as well as payroll for us. (I looked at your site and didn't see anything.)
- mathattack 12y agoWhat is an integrated timecard?
- e40 12y agoPeople are paid from what's on their timecard (aka timesheet) and job cost and billing is generated from the single source.
- mathattack 12y agoAhh - got it!
- edawerd 12y agoWe have a number of great 3rd party time tracking software tools thats integrate well with ZenPayroll via our api. For example ,TSheets, WageBase, Nimble Schedule. https://zenpayroll.com/integrations https://zenpayroll.com/integrations
- hkmurakami 12y agoI read that Google Capital rather than Google Ventures lead the round. Could someone explain to me how these two bodies differ and what the significance would be?
- edawerd 12y agoGoogle Capital and Google Ventures are two different investments arms of Google. Google Ventures focuses a lot more on early stage companies (and makes many investments throughout the year), while Google Capital focus on later, growth stage companies. Google Capital tends to only do a few large investments each year. In ZenPayroll's case, we were honored to have strong interest from both GCap and GV, so they both invested, with GCap leading.
- hkmurakami 12y agoAh thanks for the insight. I know that GV is a separate entity from Google proper with a chinese wall in place between the corporate mothership and itself. Is this the case with GC as well?
- Vaismania 12y agoCongrats guys! We've been with Intuit for the last 5 years and recently made the transitioned to ZenPayroll - we haven't looked back. Huge fan of the automated emails along with their outstanding on-boarding/support.
- muhammadusman 12y agoLove getting paid using ZenPayroll!
- guiseppecalzone 12y agoIt’s been amazing to see ZenPayroll grow over the last few years. We switched to ZenPayroll from Wellsfargo. It was night and day. Wellsfargo made every step of the process difficult, from on-boarding new employees, to sending me paperwork, to updating salaries. When I use ZenPayroll, it feels like they went through every customer interaction point and thought through how to make it a delightful experience. I heard that ZenPayroll have a net promoter score of >80, which is incredible. For context, I just google Apple’s NPS and it’s 66 (http://customergauge.com/news/2014-net-promoter-benchmarks/ http://customergauge.com/news/2014-net-promoter-benchmarks/).
- toomuchtodo 12y agoHow well does ZenPayoll handle employee portal stuff? Like 401k contribution self service?
- edawerd 12y agoWe have a dedicated employee dashboard where employees can login do things like change bank account information, federal and state withholding , and even donate a part of their paystub to any registered 501(c). We consider the employe experience to be just as important as the payroll administrators experience.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago> and even donate a part of their paystub to any registered 501(c). Wow. Impressive!
- maccman 12y agoWe use ZenPayroll at Clearbit and couldn't be happier! Such a well thought out experience all round. Here's hoping they'll start selling health and office insurance too so we can drop our other providers.
- tarof 12y agozenpayroll is awesome. no more pain
- sgarg26 12y agoNext week: Google launches its own payroll service