Fatihah Ramzi, DigitalCFO Asia | 29 November 2022
Ben Thompson, CEO, KeyPay & Co-Founder, Employment Hero
The value propositions of applications for human resources are evolving. Leading firms are utilizing HR software to streamline and fully engage their workforces. Administrative tools to facilitate data collecting and allow employee self-service are becoming a standard.
Using HR software, managers may schedule people for work, keep track of their performance, and assist staff members in advancing in their careers and learning new skills. Reports on tax compliance, payroll and benefit expenses, and headcount analysis to forecast future costs are valued by the finance teams. And many individuals from other departments use information from HR systems to enhance the employee experience in leading firms.
KeyPay is an all in one Singapore payroll software made for accountants and payroll outsource providers. It automates the entire payroll journey and free up time to grow the company’s client base. To find out more about the benefits that a HR Software like KeyPay can offer, DigitalCFO Asia spoke with Ben Thompson, CEO, KeyPay & Co-Founder, Employment Hero.
The Vision For Employment Hero And KeyPay After The Acquisition
“Through my years of experience in employment law, I had a front row seat to the devastation caused by poorly managed employment in SMBs,” says Ben Thompson, CEO, KeyPay & Co-Founder, Employment Hero. To help address these issues, Dave Tong and Ben founded Employment Hero in 2014. The business has grown considerably over the years and whilst achieving “unicorn” valuation at $1.25 billion earlier this year, acquiring KeyPay was also a critical next step in their growth.
Payroll processing has always been a painfully manual task for accountants, bookkeepers, and payroll service providers. Australia ranks as having one of the top 5 most complicated payroll systems in the world, and so KeyPay was originally launched in Australia in 2012 with the mission to create a more accessible version of payroll by utilising the capacity of the cloud.
Bringing the vision of automation to life, KeyPay streamlines the flow of data from employees across rosters, timesheets, leave management, and reporting, providing full client visibility of the pay run at all times in a single integrated platform.
Since its launch, KeyPay has dramatically changed the payroll landscape by offering clients an all-in-one catering to the diverse business needs of businesses across Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia.
“Looking ahead, we hope to further evolve Employment Hero and KeyPay to empower our partnership network with a complete suite of payroll and employment management tools, saving hours of manual effort, and opening the door to value-adding and people advisory services, and new revenue streams,” says Ben Thompson, CEO, KeyPay & Co-Founder, Employment Hero.
The Gaps In Singapore That KeyPay Can Close Or Minimise
Payroll processing is difficult across the globe, and each country has its own legislation complexities. A common issue faced by accountants, bookkeepers and payroll service providers in Singapore is leave management. Due to the different leave entitlements for employees, based on varying factors such as years of employment and individual agreements, manual payroll processing can be time consuming and prone to errors.
This is not only detrimental for businesses, but can also lead to disputes from employees. Compliance is also an ongoing issue that has only grown in severity with the implementation of remote working and payroll processing across borders. On top of this, there are not many solution providers in the region that can effectively tackle these challenges.
“With KeyPay, we hope to help mitigate these risks and help safeguard employees being paid incorrectly, as well as protect our partners and clients from compliance issues through effective automation,” says Ben Thompson, CEO, KeyPay & Co-Founder, Employment Hero.
The Uniqueness Of KeyPay
“KeyPay is built by payroll professionals, for payroll professionals, and is designed specifically with payroll service providers in mind,” says Ben Thompson, CEO, KeyPay & Co-Founder, Employment Hero.
KeyPay sets itself apart from competitors by being an all-in-one integrated payroll and workforce management platform that streamlines various processes for accountants and bookkeepers. What KeyPay’s partners love is not having to use multiple systems to provide payroll and people services. This reduces costs but also eliminates double handling of data.
By embracing cloud technology and automation, the time savings allows their partners to invest more hours into nurturing their existing client relationships, take on more clients without adding additional headcount, and adhere to payroll compliance requirements more easily. KeyPay makes it possible for accounting and bookkeeping firms to expand revenue streams beyond just payroll and traditional accounting services.
Unique to KeyPay is its pay conditions engine. This allows users to build rules of custom employment agreements into the platform to automate unique pay conditions, overtime rates and entitlements, saving hours of manual calculations.
KeyPay provides a Bureau Dashboard that allows its partners to have a bird’s eye view of all the pay run activities in one location. Statuses such as “Error” and “Overdue” help its partners to prioritise the key tasks and make sure nothing critical goes unnoticed. Partners can also perform bulk actions, such as finalising pay runs. Beyond that, partners also have access to a partner dashboard which allows them to have a centralised location to manage business settings, such as business templates, and clients seamlessly.
KeyPay In Allowing Employees To Spend More Time On Value-Added Work
Payroll is a very tedious and time-consuming process in a business that includes managing things like leave balances, deductions and tax calculations manually across various countries with personalised requirements for all individuals employed.
“We have seen that businesses are placing increased importance on their accountants to provide more advisory services, and less transactional work,” says Ben Thompson, CEO, KeyPay & Co-Founder, Employment Hero.
By automating payroll, service providers are able to take on new outsourced payroll clients while actually cutting down their workload. The time saved can be refocused on expanding their client base, or even moving into new markets, further increasing revenue.
For example, EPG Payroll & HR used KeyPay as their operational backbone to move into new markets and support clients with their international expansion. Empowered by KeyPay’s wide ranging capabilities and local compliance functionality across 5 different regions, EPG were able to streamline processes and expand their services globally.
