Seamless Payroll Integrations: How Financial Wellness & Benefits Tech Are Transforming Workplaces

[00:00:00] Yeah, ultimately we're out there and we're consolidating this data, right? So I like the way I describe it is it's almost like a funnel. We're getting all these disparate data from all these different places and we're pushing it out in a single, you know, in a single feed to your end provider. To that client so that they can get their data in one spot, one place.

[00:00:31] Hey, this is William Tincup and Ryan Leary. You are listening, hopefully watching the Use Case Podcast. I was about to say You Should Know Podcast, but it's actually the Use Case Podcast. We've got Doug on from Payroll Integrations. Ryan, how are you doing? I'm fantastic, man. You know what? I'm not the one who was going to say the wrong podcast name, so I can hang my hat on that. And I did just because everybody wants to hear this.

[00:00:57] Yes. I did send you an audio of you forgetting somebody's name. Oh, 100%. On one of the podcasts we did at HR Tech, which I thought was hilarious. I called one woman the wrong name. You did. You forgot a woman's name and then you called another woman the wrong name. Yeah. These are three wins I have. I don't get many wins, Doug, over him. I've got to flaunt them when they happen. Absolutely. Honestly, it's very easy to forget names. I do it all the time. I'll meet someone, shake their hand and be like,

[00:01:26] why did I have to focus on introducing my own name? I know my own name, right? Yes. It's so true. It's so true. I need people to wear name badges all the time so that I can just go, oh yeah, Frank, how you doing? He got the locks of hair and I got the memorization of names. Yes, he did. To win. So we have Doug from Payroll Integrations on today. Doug, would you do us a brief introduction? Tell us a little bit about yourself and the company. Sure. My name is Doug Sabella. I'm co-founder and CEO of Payroll Integrations.

[00:01:56] A little bit about myself, myself and my family. We're down in San Diego, which is where our company is headquartered. We're fully remote though. So we're spread out throughout the continental United States and actually Hawaii as well, which is a fun little tidbit. We have an Islander on the team. And yeah, you know, we're just really excited to be here. Talk about our company, who we are, what we do and how we are helping the space. Tell us a little bit about what Payroll Integrations does. Sure.

[00:02:24] So we are at its core, what's called an IPaaS integration platform as a service. And we have a software as a service built on top of that. And so effectively what we do is we're a vertical, vertical integration platform. And we connect employers payroll softwares to their benefits providers.

[00:02:44] Right. So there's the concept of like a horizontal integration platform, which is connect to anyone and everything and let people come in and develop on top of it and pull QuickBooks data and HubSpot data. And, you know, all of these various tech platforms were much more pointed and much more specialized. So you'll see that in some of our platform features that we've built out. But basically we have a specific use case that we are that we are trying to solve. And that has been our bread and butter in market.

[00:03:14] Pun intended. Pun intended. I'm going to go with that. You should know it's the use case, right? It's a use case. So, Doug, tell us where is the idea for this? Where did this come from? And what's the big problem here we're talking about? Yeah. So great question. So my co-founder and myself, we've actually known each other since elementary school. Oddly enough, he grew up up the hill from my best friend growing up. He was working at a Robo RIA, registered investment advisor, back in 2018.

[00:03:44] And, you know, he was assessing the spaces. Hey, the Robo RIA, you know, automatic advice space is pretty crowded. They put there's this area that is very underserved. Employers are ripping their hair out over having to deal with this data remission, right? Specifically between 401k and payroll. So, you know, we came together and built out this platform.

[00:04:13] And basically the issue that employers have is if they're not using a solution like ours, there's two options, right? There's the manual option, which is I'm a dentist out of Ohio, right? I don't have a lot of time to deal with Ben admin in general, but I'm using Transamerica as my 401k. I've got to pull down five different reports out of my payroll software, cobble all this data together, right? And this is every payroll period. So if you're running a weekly payroll, you're doing this every single week.

[00:04:42] And you're pulling social securities names, addresses, making sure that everything is as up to date, termination dates, all of these things and compensation and deferrals. And you're passing that along to your 401k, for example. And then, you know, with Ryan, if you were to update your 401k election from a 3% Roth to a 5% pre-tax election, that dentist, assuming they don't have an HR department in their small office, is tasked with doing that, updating that back in payroll in a timely manner.

[00:05:11] Now, obviously, there's a ton of Department of Labor and IRS regulations that go along with like timeliness of investment, things like that, to make sure that employees are vesting their deferred dollars in a timely manner. So it's a huge headache. There's been a number of studies that, you know, employers are spending over 100 hours a year just on this process alone. And that's just for, you know, if you have one payroll instance, right?

[00:05:35] So that is, that can be multiples of that if you have a larger company with different payroll instances, different EINs, things like that. So basically what we, we've built is a plug and play solution that eliminates that. So ultimately, what would historically just be, like I said, this very cumbersome process, an employer can connect to their payroll, like authenticate and start sending data to their 401k or their, you know, HSA or health insurance or whomever in five to 10 minutes.

[00:06:03] So, and it's set and forget, right? So they set it up and based on the configuration, our platform is meant to send. I did say there was two options. So the other option just getting to that would be if an employer can set up an EDI feed, which is basically a file feed. And that is cost prohibitive and also size prohibitive.

[00:06:24] So most small employers aren't even, don't even have enough assets under management at these firms to warrant them spending resources interfacing with the payroll company to build something out. So they were just not served at all. And the large companies would be spending $20,000 to $50,000 in six to eight months of their time building this out.

[00:06:46] So, anywho, circling back, co-founders saw this inefficiency in the space, said, hey, there's no one out here doing this. Let's go try to build partnerships with these payroll platforms. And, yeah, from there, you know, it's been a steady uphill battle trying to knock down the doors of all these institutions. You know, they look at us and get, who are you? You're a scrappy startup. Why would we give you access to payroll data?

[00:07:09] So a lot of overtime building up reputation to get to the point where we are marketplace partners with all of these large providers like ADP, paychecks, people like that. So, yeah, that is the core problem that we are out there solving today. And, you know, we're doing great. So really, really excited about what the future holds. So for the audience, their edification, sometimes they hear payroll.

[00:07:34] Sometimes they hear benefits management, 401k, HRIS, core HR. Like, some of these are synonyms, maybe. But explain kind of for – because you're dealing with pipes of data and you're integrated with libraries of data. And so you're bringing that into a central location and then pushing it back out to whomever needs to be pushed back out to, right? Exactly, yeah.

[00:07:59] So we're aggregating all of the necessary data to effectively implement what would be a standard feed of data, right? Right. So whatever the employer would have to do on a day-by-day basis to administer their own plan, we automate that. So, yeah, like you said, there's all these different softwares out there. And a lot of them are synonymous with each other and there's a lot of overlap, right? So payroll companies do offer HRIS solutions and things like that.

[00:08:28] So HCM solutions, like all of those good things. So, yeah, ultimately we're out there and we're consolidating this data, right? So the way I describe it is it's almost like a funnel. We're getting all these disparate data from all these different places and we're pushing it out in a single feed to your end provider. To that client so that they can get their data in one spot, one place. Correct.

[00:08:54] People don't know, most people don't know unless they've spent a lot of time in payroll, the payroll libraries and the complexity of payroll libraries. We're not going to deal with global payroll for right now, but just domestic payroll, four walls of the United States. You've got federal, you've got state, you've got municipal, you've got all kinds of things that are going on.

[00:09:16] So if Seattle changes their minimum wage and you're that dentist in Topeka and you've got an employee in Seattle, how the hell do you keep track of that? So the payroll companies, the paychecks and the ADPs of the world, they're always updating those libraries. They're constantly updating those libraries.

[00:09:38] And yet another benefit, if you're integrated with their data as they update their pipes based on different legislation or otherwise, then that's already updated in your system, which means it's already updated for your clients. Exactly. So there's just less management needed and less awareness needed, honestly, for them. Right. So, you know, the payroll companies do a really great job of, like you said, maintaining these libraries and keeping up with new legislation and new codes.

[00:10:06] So, you know, I know I've been harping on 401k, but the maximum contribution limit changes every single year. Right. And so that's a headache for an employer to have to monitor, you know, has William hit his 22,500 contribution for the year? So payroll does a really good job of kind of being the gatekeeper there, whereas we are reading all of that data and ingesting it and sending it out to the proper parties. So, yeah, you are correct.

[00:10:34] And that's also the benefit of just being an API partner with all of these payroll companies, too, is that it's all, you know, it's all real time. So they make an update and the data that we're receiving is what is reflected in their payroll software. Right. Doug, as you're talking to your clients, your prospects, what is it that you're seeing trend-wise around benefit management? Where's the problem? Like, where are they really feeling the pain at?

[00:11:03] I know that changes all the time, but in 24, as we go into 25, I'm curious to get your thoughts there. Where is that pain laying right now? So, you know, without tooting our horn a little bit or, you know, at risk of tooting our horn a little bit too much, I do think it is just the general connectivity between systems, to be honest. Just what I've heard anecdotally over the past couple of years is that pretty much everything is becoming automated at this point.

[00:11:31] And this is kind of the last frontier or the quote-unquote holy grail of like, okay, how do we connect all these disparate systems and disparate data sets together to not only, you know, just provide a consolidated feed of data for an employer, but also, you know, like help advisors make better decisions. And, you know, like taking this information. So a lot of people have, a lot of people, a lot of organizations have this concept of like ownership of data, right?

[00:12:00] And it was very much like my, my, mine. And there was not really much, not really much incentive for them to share, right? Because they're getting what they get, but what they've been getting is the bare minimum. So trying to create a solution to connect everything and honestly just impact financial wellness outcomes for employees is hot on employers' minds. Because financial wellness is the overarching topic and theme being discussed at most HR events.

[00:12:30] I mean, I know AI, you guys said you were at HR tech. You got it. Everybody and their mom had an AI something rather, right? So, you know, that's great. If we're just talking about what rolls downhill to your employer, employee base, if you're an employer, it's financial wellness. That's, that's what I see. And like what, what companies are doing to make that the most effective solution for the employer at all.

[00:13:00] Why wouldn't, this is just my curiosity, why wouldn't a plan source, a Benefocus or a light or even any of the payroll companies, but, you know, at workday or whatever, why wouldn't they want to be integrated? Why, why would, what's the counter argument for them? Why wouldn't they want this to happen? So that's a great question. I'll, I'll take it from the payroll lens to start, right?

[00:13:26] So obviously there is another hot topic is data security, right? So the, the data that is readily available out of the payroll software is about as sensitive as you're going to get, right? That's the data that, you know, people are chomping at the bit to take and sell on the dark web. Now for them, historically, in some cases, it's an anti-competitive measure. You know, some of them do have benefits offerings as well.

[00:13:54] So it's, they don't want anyone and everyone going in and cannibalizing their own business. But a lot of it, honestly, is just, they offer curated marketplaces that their sales team needs to be aware of all of the options. And if you have a thousand different options in your marketplace for the same thing, it becomes confusing. And their Salesforce can't effectively, you know, sell partner products to employers.

[00:14:19] They need to know, like, these are our go-to offerings for, you know, from our partner network that we can help solve problem XYZ for you. So, again, a lot of it, like I said, data security, super important, not letting anybody and everybody in and making sure that who you're working with is up to snuff from a data security perspective. But also, like I said, this walled garden mentality of, like, let's make sure we curate. Because ultimately, they are vouching for a company like ours who is a partner of theirs. Like, they are in our marketplace.

[00:14:49] We have gone through all of the hoops to make sure that this company is offering a secure and viable solution for you. So, you've recently, this year, you released the financial wellness report. We were talking about financial wellness where it all kind of rolls down to that. Maybe a little off topic, but maybe not. What have you learned from that report?

[00:15:17] I think the most interesting finding was around Gen Z and retirement, personally. I mean, I know everybody loves talking about Gen Z. It's just, you know, in every single article, Newsweek, Forbes, whomever, they're all hot on, like, what is Gen Z doing? Um, my favorite tidbit from the report, which is phenomenal. I recommend everybody go read it. It's really interesting if you're interested in just general, like, employee financial wellness.

[00:15:43] Was the number of Gen Z is contributing less to their retirement compared to other cohorts, so other generations. But the ones who are contributing are contributing at a much higher clip than other generations are. So, I think I'd have to go pull the numbers, but if I remember correctly, it's like Gen Z on average are contributing.

[00:16:09] The ones who are contributing to their 401k are contributing 7%, whereas, like, the average across other generations are, like, between 3% to 5%. So, you know, you have to wonder. Like, they have their mind on their futures. They understand that, you know, the financial landscape right now is difficult, and saving for your retirement is important. But I do feel like a lot of them feel like they're being – and the data is indicative, right? I do feel like a lot of them are being financially squeezed to the point where they can't.

[00:16:37] So, it's kind of this dichotomy where they want to save, but they just can't afford to right now. And I think that just – that speaks to larger macro trends in the space, well beyond just employee financial wellness, right? But, yeah, I found that to be kind of my most interesting takeaway was how the general financial landscape is impacting things like saving and retirement and all of that cool stuff. Also, they want lifestyle benefits. That was, like, the biggest takeaway from Gen Z.

[00:17:06] It's, you know, pay for my gym, pay for all that. And I was like, yeah, if I was 22 years old, I would want that paid for as well, right? So, yeah. So, relationships with consulting firms, people that consult in payroll, vendor selection, that type of stuff, do you do all your own implementations and manage all that stuff? Or do you work with some consulting firms to help you out? We do, yeah. So, we build direct with all of our payroll partners.

[00:17:35] So, we're not – like I said, everything that we are implementing is like an API partnership with our payroll partners, right? So, we want to be marketplace partners. And, again, harkening back to what I said before, because of the type of data that we're dealing with, we want to make sure that we are – we have, you know, guaranteed escalation pathways within the payroll partners that we're working with, guaranteed uptime and things like that.

[00:17:58] But, you know, for us, it is paramount that if we're offering a solution, it is the solution. And so, we want to make sure we go direct with all of these companies that we offer integration with. So, yeah. But we build everything in-house, all of the integrations that we build, you know, like our ADP, for example, all of our apps on their marketplace are direct build. We have a super talented dev team who tackles all of that, and we're constantly adding more. For the audience, those are native integrations. Correct. Yeah.

[00:18:28] Yeah. So, quick question, Ryan. You talked about security. What are the things that people are looking for in terms of compliance? Is it ISO or SOC, or is there anything that's distinct that people look to make sure that – or are they just going to go and try to hack it and see if they can break it? So, on our side, the one we get requested the most is the SOC audit, right? Yeah.

[00:18:56] Everything else is a cherry on top, right? Right. Right. They want to make sure – we're dealing with financial data, ultimately, and census data, which is very sensitive. They want to make sure that all your controls are in place. They want to make sure that, you know, the technology you're using is kind of like cutting edge or at least as close to as it can be. And the SOC audit really covers the majority of that. So, yeah.

[00:19:25] So, when we look at – Sorry. How often does SOC – how often do you have to redo that? Every year. So, you're just constantly in a testing period. So, there's no three months where you're taking a summer vacation from background checks and everything. It's a constant thing. All right. Thank you. Ryan? I wanted to get into the platform itself. As you're talking and walking people through, what's interesting to the people that you're talking to?

[00:19:53] When they're inside your platform, you're walking them through, what are they looking at? It's like, yes, right here. This is it where I just have a cluster right now, and this is going to be the savior. Well, I think what is most interesting, and obviously our breadth of connections is very interesting in how easy it is for benefits providers to be onboarded to our platform. I mean, it's zero work for them ultimately to get connected. So, that's great, right? They love that.

[00:20:22] It's low to no cost for them to get going on our platform. But what really kind of tips it over the edge for them is all of the benefit-specific tooling that we've built into our platform. So, when you're implementing – I'm just going to go back to 401k because it's the most complex. When you're implementing a 401k plan, there are tons of variables that can go into who can participate, when they can participate, when you're enrolled, all of these different things.

[00:20:46] And if you're just giving people a firehose of data, they ultimately need to build a product on top of that to rationalize the data that they're receiving, right? So, what we've built within our platform is, for lack of a better term, like a filtering mechanism to say, like, okay, you know, we only want employees who have worked 1,000 hours and were hired after X date.

[00:21:12] You know, like all of these – all these Boolean, like yes-no tooling, tools into it. And also just our ability to read data and, like, present it in a way out of payroll is really unique and is very useful for administrators on the benefits administrator side to come into our platform and use it. So, ultimately, we've built – the piping, like William said before, is kind of – that is the core product, right? Because without the back end, there is no front end.

[00:21:41] But the front end is what really people come in and they use, and they use it to manage every plan that they have on our platform and see – you know, they can access all the data and use all this benefit tooling to their advantage. So, for the audience, let's just make sure we drill down there. Are they working in payroll integrations to run payroll? So, they are not. That is all run out of their payroll software. So, when we receive, you know, a completed payroll record, right?

[00:22:10] So, that basically a little light goes off that says, yep, you know, William Coe completed their payroll. Right. It's a new payroll ID to our system. We will reach out through the APIs, pull the information down, and then all that information is available out of our platform, right? Like, they can download it, they can mess with configurations, and they can actually rerun the data. So, obviously, the data that comes out of payroll is locked in.

[00:22:35] We're getting pay slips and we're getting whatever is available on employee profile at the given time that it is locked and completed. But the data that is being processed and sent through to the benefits provider, the 401k provider, whomever, that is where it gets configurable, right? Because, again, like, there's this fire hose element of it. And it's like, how do we trim that tree down to have it be exactly what you want?

[00:23:01] And, like, so that's what our platform does is it trims that tree so that way they're only getting, you know, the nice Christmas tree, not the 200-foot pine tree in the middle of the forest. I don't think pine trees grow that big, but, you know, just as an example. They could. They could. East Texas, they grow pretty tall. Jersey's got big pine barons. They get pretty big there. So let's talk about who you are selling to. So for everyone that's listening, we get the use case.

[00:23:31] We know what you do. Are we talking five-person company or are we talking 50,000-person company? Where are we at in that mix? Yeah, so we're fully across the board, right? So obviously there are a lot more small and medium businesses out there than there are Fortune 500 companies. Fortune 500 is a 500 group for a reason. But so, I mean, we span everything.

[00:23:57] Now, obviously, the examples I gave at the beginning were the dentists in Ohio, right? Like, they don't want to deal with the admin piece of this. They don't have an HR staff or whatever. Like, this is just a no-brainer for them. It's low cost. They can come in and they can just get this set up really easily and forget about it. So we definitely skew to the smaller side, but we run the gamut from two-person shops. Our largest right now is 35K. We can handle much larger than that as well. That's just an opportunity thing.

[00:24:25] So really, it's anybody and everybody. But again, we're a volume shop, so we're going to typically see more in the 10 to 50 employee range. That's kind of our average. Well, and their complexity is less than a 10,000 person. Correct. They might have multiple payroll systems doing different things, usually through acquisitions.

[00:24:54] They'll acquire somebody and still keep that payroll system for that part of the company. Exactly. People wake up and they've got 13 different payroll systems. So let me ask you the question for the audience that buying questions that they should ask. If they've never bought something like this, what should they be asking?

[00:25:19] What types of questions or even specifically, if you could script it, what questions should they be asking? Well, first, they should ask how much it costs. Right? That's the big one. But if I'm a small business and I am a buyer for this, right, and I'm using a K provider who is one of our partners, I would want to know what is my turnaround time? How quickly can I get this implemented?

[00:25:49] What is my overhead if I wanted to build this myself? I would never recommend a small business do this. But they want to know what are my options, right? So EDI feeds, which we discussed before, not really available to most and very expensive. So, you know, is there any annual maintenance? How frequently is data being received by my provider? How frequently is data being updated? All of those questions, I think, are important.

[00:26:19] And also, you know, like, who are your competitors? What are the other options out there in market? And, you know, allow us to differentiate ourselves by what's great in our platform. So that's really, like, what I would encourage everybody to be asking when making not just this, but, like, any buying decision, right? Right. Is what is assess the market, see who is having the most success and why they're successful and make an informed decision.

[00:27:15] Yeah. And you have access to all of that information from us. Yeah. So how do they even know they have a problem? How do they know they need to reach out to you? That is. That's a good question. Now, that's the million-dollar question, right? So. I mean, I don't wake up one day and say, hey, that guy, Doug. Dude, I want to reach out to him. Like, how do I know? If I'm a 10-person, 20-person shop, like, how do I even know I have this issue? Or I have the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:43] I mean, it's one of those things where it becomes so ingrained in your day-to-day that it's just like, this is just another process, right? Like, this is part of running a business. So. Payroll takes six days to run. Oh, okay. Yeah. Totally. Makes sense. Yeah. So it's like, maybe someday I'll hire somebody to do this if I, you know, my margins hit what they need to hit, right? So, no, that is a great question. How do we kind of, like, flip that mindset for them? Like, this is not just something that they need to be doing.

[00:28:08] Like, so this is something that we work specifically with our benefits partners on. There's a lot of co-marketing, a lot of, like, one-sheeters around, like, what is the benefit of having a fully integrated suite, right? Like, how quickly does data come through? How much time are you going to spend on this? The answer is zero, obviously, once it's set up. And what are your ultimate cost savings? So it's, you know, trying to put in, like, up in lights and big bold letters, like, here's how much time and money you're going to save.

[00:28:37] Because most business owners look at that and just write off the bat at the headline and say, oh, that makes a lot of sense. How much is this going to cost me? And then they go down the rabbit hole and they find out that it is very marginal. And they go, oh, my God, I pay myself less than that in a single day. So they – we very rarely get any pushback.

[00:29:01] Most people kind of, like, get it instantly once they understand the messaging around, like, the benefits of the product itself. I think there might be a total compensation play. Years ago, compensation professionals wanted to go to kind of a total comp report.

[00:29:23] So, yeah, payroll is one line item, but then there's all the other line items that kind of make up all of that 401K benefits, all of those things. And you can't – well, you can manually. Don't do that. But you can't do that if all the disparate systems aren't talking to one another. Correct. So I think there might be an opportunity to then just say, let's start total comp. How are you communicating total comp to your employees?

[00:29:51] And then that begets the, well, we're just kind of – everything's a little bit separate. We've got 401K reporting. We've got benefits reporting. We've got payroll reporting. I was like, yeah, that's cool, but it's not integrated. Yeah. So how do you do report cards? How do you give them an update once a quarter or every payroll? How do you give them an update on total comp? If you do it, you can do it manually. In fact, I know people that do it manually.

[00:30:20] However, you shouldn't do it manually. And I think that that could be a potential way to sell is just talk more about total comp, not talk about payroll, not talk about payroll, not talk about benefits, not talk about 401K. Not talk about all the other things. Talk about them holistically and say communications to your employees. Here's how you communicate. All of the things that they get, not just one thing. Because payroll, yeah, okay.

[00:30:49] Most of it's going to be direct deposit. They might not ever look at it. You know, you've got that, like it just goes into the bank account. I have no idea what was taken out or whatever or why or all that other stuff. But there is something to giving them the overlay of saying, you got that. You've got bonuses. You've got these other things, benefits.

[00:31:12] You can now see all of that so the employees can see what they get that's not just payroll. Yeah, it's almost – that's a great point. It's almost like showcasing your value as an employer to your employees, right? So it goes well beyond, like you said, just here's how much is being put into my bank account every single pay period. You know, if they're paying for health insurance, that's a pretty penny, right?

[00:31:41] So, you know, understanding that, hey, if, you know, myself as Ohio dentist wasn't out here giving you health and dental and all of these things, like this is what it would cost you in market. So here's like the actual like real value of what we are paying right now. I think that's a very underserved communication to employees because people – employees will just leave and go to another company for another, let's say, a thousand, a couple thousand dollars.

[00:32:08] They don't realize all the other ancillary things that they got. Yeah. I think the companies, to win, especially win talent, retain talent, they just got to do a better job of communicating. If they do a better job communicating, if I've got the logic right, then a part of that is in being able to actually give them access to seeing kind of that total comp. So they can go, oh, oh, wow.

[00:32:36] So this new job, the current job pays 100% of my health care. This new job only pays 50% of my health care. Well, that's $1,500 a month. Yeah. How much is health care? If they don't see it, right? That's right. Yeah. They don't see it. They just know that they're getting paid. Right. Right. So I think it would be an interesting test to just not talk about the plumbing and talk more about communications.

[00:33:05] No, I completely agree. I think sometimes people gloss over when we talk too tech to them. In fact, Ryan and I, we advise a lot of startups in this particular go-to-market. It's like stop telling them how you do shit because they don't care, nor should they care. They care about the output of what you do. What's the output and why? Why is that important? So – How are you making my life better, right? That's the big thing.

[00:33:33] Because ultimately, everyone's looking at it through the lens of what is my day-to-day? How does this make me more efficient or how does it make my life easier, right? So I think it's a great point. And our salespeople are very in tune with that messaging as well. We're not all out here at technology conferences talking to people. You're talking to the dentist and whoever. That's right.

[00:34:01] Probably, like you said, don't give two shits about how it is being done as long as it's being done and it's being done in a way that their employee data is. Even when you tell them, they really don't know. You've just confused them more. It's almost as if – and I've always thought this. You almost want to give the person Red Bull, right? Give them their wings. Get them all hyped up. And then tell them how great you're going to make them look. This is how great you're going to look when William sees that he's making $100,000.

[00:34:31] But in reality, if he adds up all the other stuff we're doing and we're going to because it's going to be right there. It's more like $150,000, right? It's $40,000 a year for insurance. William doesn't know that because it's 100% covered. That's right. Do you have – Doug, do you all have some success stories that you can tell us a little bit about? And, again, you don't have to use brand names or any of that type of stuff. We don't care about that.

[00:34:57] It's more of the didn't have this before, did have it now, stuff like that. I mean we have thousands of employers who are using our platform, so every single one of them is their own unique success story, right? Whether or not you want to take that at face value is fine. But let me think about a really good one. So we have a food and beverage company, let's put it that way, who came onto our platform recently.

[00:35:27] They were spending basically what amounts to two to three people's salaries on an annual basis just managing their integrations, right? And they viewed this as – this is spend that people – they're wasting employee time on this process, and their time could be better served doing other HR function, right? So they came to their provider.

[00:35:56] Their provider recommended us as a partner, and our sales folks went in. And we pitched them, and they said, you know, this is great. Why have I never heard of this before type of thing, you know? And they signed up quick, and we got them onboarded, I want to say like a month or two ago. And, you know, they've been really, really excited just about everything that's going on and their cost savings. So from them, it's data efficiency.

[00:36:26] They found that everything is running much more efficiently within their HR department. They're saving a lot of time and money, just some like operational expenditure. And also just the data delivery and lack of data errors is making their employees happier because there's nobody in their fat fingering stuff in an Excel sheet. People's money is being invested on time. Nobody's asking questions about like why was my contribution not updated for this payroll? So they're just seeing employee satisfaction across the board.

[00:36:56] So, yeah. But, yeah, large F&B company who has seen a lot of success even in just the early stages of this. So our hope is that, you know, like I said, it's a set and forget product. If we never hear from them again and they just keep running, that means we're doing our job. That's right. Right. Yeah. Well, and the sanity of those assuming that they're not overstaffing the process, they're just overworking one person to be two or three people, that person's now retained.

[00:37:25] They're going to go do a job that they want to do and they're not pulling their hair out every day or every week trying to do this stuff. You know, this reminds me, I was talking to a CHRO. This is a couple of years back and this is all in the United States. It's probably 60,000 employees and she had 21 different payroll systems. And again, a lot of this was through acquisitions. And when the CFO would ask her a basic question, how many employees do we have?

[00:37:54] It took her two weeks to answer because she had four analysts that were managing all of those different things that would actually have to get together and compare data. And then like, and in real, in real-ish time, two weeks. And she's like, it's killing me. It's just, I should be able to answer. It's a simple question. How many employees do we have? That should be a simple question. And I can't answer it.

[00:38:21] And so it reminds me of that. And of course, her bit was, I'm going to get them all on the same payroll systems so that I can actually, so there's a whole digital transformation, change management, all kinds of stuff that she's going to have to deal with. But she wanted one system so that she could answer the question and get those analysts to do other work. And again, just redeploy them into other aspects of the business. Yeah.

[00:38:50] And like you said, that's time and money that the analysts can be spent doing other stuff, right? Right. And like Ryan was saying, if people are overworked, your turnover is going to be higher. So that is kind of like a hidden cost of the whole process, right? Right. Right. Hiring is expensive, whether you like to admit it or not. You lose productivity when someone leaves. You got to backfill and then it's a couple months of training. So other folks are getting overworked and burned out. And it's kind of a vicious cycle there. Yeah. These are the overlooked things.

[00:39:19] And I think that a lot of employers overlook. It's not so much. We had to put X amount of investment into a solution. It's not sexy. But it's sexy to the employees. Yeah. Right. You can't mess payroll up. It almost, depending on the platform, right? There are some people that I know where they know it's a menial task. But they get to play in a really cool platform doing it and they're excited.

[00:39:49] If it's only for six months, they're excited for the six months that you still kept them. They haven't left. And now they're doing other things because they've grown and adapted. Now they're taking on a different task, things like that. Modernizing the tech stack or the tech in the company, it just goes a long way. It gets overlooked. It's interesting because what you're touching on, Ryan, is employee experience. Yeah. Part of the employee experience is the software that they interact with. Yeah.

[00:40:16] It's almost as if, and I know we're not, we should hold a therapy session for Doug, not the interview. 100%. But I kind of feel like we're just going to rework your whole sales. I was like, forget the demo, forget the tech, forget like that's, get that. Let's talk about the experience of your employees. Right? Like, like those are the things when I hear you talk about that, that's, that's what I'm feeling. Like I'd be proud to work on that because now I can come in as an analyst or whatever I'm doing. I don't have to actually give you the information. Yeah. I can do my job. Yeah.

[00:40:46] People feel fulfilled learning new things. Right. Right. And if you're bogged down, just clicking the same button every single day for eight hours straight, you know, you're going to get burned out. Right. And so. Oh, and I'll need to learn. You said Boolean way back and I damn near vomit it in my mouth because I come from that world of recruiting and I could just see somebody in Excel. Like, I'm so excited. I just learned how to concatenate. Like, no, I'm not excited for that. Like there's technology to do this and that's you. Right.

[00:41:15] Like, so these are the things like, yeah, it's important. I think these are the things that make this work. Overlooked, but vastly important. Doug, love what you're, what you're doing, what you've built, you and your partner. Um, and thank you for coming on the show and educating the audience as to what you do, but also the, the why as to why they need it. So.