Our first meetings with new partners often start similarly: they're excited about launching a payroll product but want to know whether they'll need to build other things before they're in a favorable position to offer payroll. This quick guide highlights what is needed versus what's nice to have and outlines our wish list for creating the best product. For companies just starting to think about the roadmap, it's also helpful to see what elements you may want to add to the backlog to create a market-leading product.
One thing we do encounter every week is platforms who always think they're not ready. Quarter after quarter we frequently hear the same platform say "there's just a few more tweaks we want to make to our (worker experience / time tracking / back end) before we launch payroll" One thing that's not intuitive is how painful and clunky your customers current payroll experience is, and how easy it is to replace that pain with something that works a lot better.
We have so many stories about our customers who launched without all the bells and whistles and still delighted their customer base. One of our most successful customers serves a base of businesses that need to track hours. They boldly launched a payroll product before they had a time tracking feature - and their customers still found it to be a much, much better product than what they left behind. As their payroll business grew they became more aware of exactly how a time tracking product would fit it, and they launched an integrated product a year later. During that year they enjoyed the retention benefits of payroll, the extra revenue, and most importantly: their customers had a simple, integrated payroll solution to use. Today it's even better. We share that story to reassure all the platforms who are on the fence: it's usually better to just get started.
At the most basic level, the key to building a great product is simple: [.c-highlighted] Collect or have access to as many payroll-related data fields as possible. [.c-highlighted] If all the data needed to run payroll lives in your system, the rationale to run payroll there becomes compelling, your adoption will be higher, and the user experience is dramatically better than what your businesses are doing today. However, don't worry: we've helped platforms design a great payroll product by meeting them where they are today and providing a path to enhance the product over time. After all, it's likely that the bar is low to beat the experience your customers are used to today with legacy payroll tools. So, even though we want to build something that genuinely productizes the pain of running payroll, launching something that integrates into their existing toolset - yours - is already a huge step forward.
Elements to consider when planning for a payroll product
Good
A logical home for the payroll interface. We need to begin by identifying where we'll embed the payroll experience. We typically suggest to customers that this be in a web-based application. We've built many payroll products before and remain excited for a partner to figure out a great way to do a fully mobile payroll run experience. We haven't seen anyone do this successfully - yet. Therefore, we suggest starting with a web-based home for payroll, a place owners and admins are already using.
Basic employer information. You can showcase to businesses why your payroll product is easier than what they're used to by leveraging the data you already have about these businesses during payroll setup. Some information that is nice to have includes the business's legal name, the business's address, the business owner's identity and address, and the person running payroll, if different. Don't worry about complicated payroll-specific data, such as filing information - Salsa's onboarding flow will easily capture those.
Employee identity. Knowing the identity of the workers your businesses need to pay is a great step to building a payroll product. It will prevent your companies from re-entering all of their employee demographics when they get set up for payroll. Ideally, you'll have access to all the workers' names and contact information. Having an email and phone number will allow your employers to quickly trigger Salsa's employee self-onboarding link and let employees fill in information themselves - this provides an easy and more delightful onboarding experience to your business owners.
Better
Employee wage data. The more employee compensation elements you collect, the better the experience your customers have. Best-in-class embedded payroll products come in platforms that have become the source of truth for worker earnings. Depending on your use case, this might be: owning the time and attendance data, knowing when employees earn tips, commissions, or other compensation, and having wage data like hourly rate or salary stored in your system. With this data, your businesses will have a superior payroll experience because they can run payroll in the same place they track worker data - which means less work, less time, and fewer errors. If you don't have this data, consider whether there is a path to get it over time via features you build or an integration with wherever this data is stored. Salsa can help with these integrations, too. For example, we can easily integrate with popular time-tracking tools like timesheets.com - find out what your customers are using, and we can figure it out together.
Bonus
Solutions for specific industry problems. Watching your customers run payroll often provides countless ideas of ways to build a product that uniquely solves payroll problems that are nuanced to your industry. Our product research team loves to help design and build solutions to these problems. Whether it's certified payroll for government contractors, a redesigned payslip that demystifies salon payroll, union requirements needed for film and television, built-in compliance designed for hospital workers, or an enhanced onboarding experience for staffing platforms - finding out what the pain point is and building a product that solves it is an excellent path to a high adoption product which not only will be a better experience for customers but far more profitable, too.
A direct relationship with workers. Not every platform offers a tool that both employers and workers use, but having a use case to create a direct product relationship with workers opens many opportunities. At the simplest level, having a dashboard inside your product where workers can log in to download their payslips and tax documents or update their payroll data creates a seamless experience. It alleviates work that might be done by business owners today. There are also opportunities to offer pay cards to workers for faster or instant payouts, advances against their earned or anticipated earnings, and a pathway to provide financial products. These opportunities start with creating a reason for workers and businesses to interact with your product.
A modernized experience. Build something competitors don't have to help your businesses attract and retain talent. We're very supportive and excited about partners envisioning faster payments to workers or shaping the experience to be more worker-centric. For example, we recently went on-site with a partner to visit one of their customers and capture everything they'd want in a payroll product built just for them. One of the small comments led to a big feature idea - workers complained that they could never estimate how much their net pay would be each week. So we decided to provide an hourly calculation that the partner could embed into a worker app showing workers exactly how much they've earned to date. In the future, they'd like to provide a forecast as well. We're sure your industry has plenty of opportunities to build a best-in-market solution. There's plenty of low-hanging fruit in payroll, and we'd love to help you find it.
Bottom line: start simple and enhance your product over time
Whether you have all these elements or very few of them - we can support you. Our components, playbooks and guides are called Salsa Express and together they help you launch a complete product out of the box. Salsa allows you to launch powerful features like time off tracking (required in many states), overtime, deductions, bonuses, and integrated contractor and employee payroll management without building anything yourself. Our easiest deployments result in a live product within a few weeks - so it's not resource intensive to start delighting customers.
With this approach, we make it easy to start with whatever you have today with what you already have, while presenting a full path you can continue to build and iterate on as your payroll product grows and matures. And remember, we're unique in that we love to help with research so that you can nail a fantastic product experience and solve a pervasive pain point for your customers. Ready to get started? Book a demo or consultation today.
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