KarbonPay

Of the many services HR offers and the myriad ways they make employees feel appreciated, payroll is probably the most frequently overlooked. In reality, payroll is pivotal to the smooth running of any business, ensuring employees are paid accurately on time, every time. It allows a company to “walk the talk” in showing that they genuinely value their most prized asset: the people. However, this is easier said than done, especially for global organizations.

Whether they’re outsourcing to an overseas workforce, operating regional divisions, or serving local markets, international companies are encumbered by many challenges while manually processing payroll. The top challenge for global companies is ensuring compliance since the regulations often differ across regions. In addition, when it comes to compliance, taxes are the first stumbling block. Even the most mundane tax tasks can quickly snowball into an HR nightmare while managing international payrolls. Not just taxes, HR teams are constantly trying to wrap their heads around the different overtime rules in each country, payslip requirements, and most importantly, making accurate and timely payroll calculations.

This brings us to a thorny question that has long remained unsettled—if payroll management is so important, why has it been so stagnant in terms of technological innovation? Or, why is payroll technology lagging behind other HR technologies?

As a payroll technology specialist, KarbonPay is answering these longstanding questions with its deep-rooted expertise in streamlining global payroll. “Current payroll technologies are unsustainable and are lagging far behind other HR technologies. KarbonPay aims to solve this by being at the forefront of technology, keeping pace with and exceeding some of the existing HR technologies on the market,” says Brad Price, Founder and CEO of KarbonPay.

"At the core, we automate compliance and payroll calculations for cross-border payroll, helping companies increase accuracy, reduce operational timelines, and drive down costs"

KarbonPay allows companies to automate gross-to-net payroll calculations across multiple countries by offering a robust cloud-based SaaS tool. With KarbonPay, companies can invest in a unified multi-country payroll strategy to address and mitigate statutory compliance and regulatory risks and optimize operational costs in the long run. “At the core, we automate compliance and payroll calculations for cross-border payroll, helping companies increase accuracy, reduce operational timelines, and drive down costs,” says Price.

Every Great Innovation Begins with a Great Idea

Established in 2019, the story of KarbonPay has its beginnings set much earlier. It all began six years ago when Price started an HR firm focused on offering compliance and complex cross-country payroll services for multi-national companies. Having worked with many such companies and different leading payroll service providers like ADP, Sage, Oracle, and more, Price experienced the challenges of cross-country payroll processing first-hand. “We would work with internal teams to gather the internal payroll data and format it as per the requirements of their service provider. We would then engage with the service provider directly to make sure that all the data was input correctly before they distributed it to their in-country partners. Once we received the data back, we would work with our customer again to iron out any issues and incorporate the changes that needed to be submitted and go through the whole process again,” explains Price.

The tedious and time-intensive process of sending data back and forth had several implications, including cost inefficiency, lack of data security, poor global reporting capabilities, and numerous inaccuracies. This made Price wonder, “Isn’t there a better way to manage cross-country payroll? If you are running payroll in the U.S. alone, there are many different software tools that can automate compliance and make instant calculations. Why is there no such solution for companies operating in multiple countries?”

Our people and their consolidated expertise are critical to the growth of our company

It is from this very idea that KarbonPay was formed. Price spent the next few months analyzing the rules of different countries, aligning similarities and differences. The review and technical analysis gave him a head start to build a scalable platform architecture. In other words, Price wanted to build a platform where certain features can be reused and others are built specifically for each country. In due course, he established KarbonPay to transform multi-country payroll processes from the ground up.

Bid Adieu to Payroll Worries

KarbonPay’s global payroll platform consolidates payroll functions with the latest technologies. The platform automatically calculates payroll by factoring in all the variables and provides instant, accurate results, saving clients time and money. While most payroll providers don’t have the option to send money across borders, with KarbonPay, clients can disburse salaries to their employees spread around the world with just a click. Employers can leverage KarbonPay’s customizable reporting capabilities to pull reports that show only the data they want to see across locations in a chosen currency and language. Clients can save report templates that they want to use again and even schedule specific reports to be emailed to them at a chosen cadence. They can also run payroll, view reports, and download payslips in any language. At the same time, clients can customize the permission levels for different tasks to provide access to the right people. For example, a company operating in ten countries might have an HR professional running payroll in France, someone else in Canada, and so on. With KarbonPay, employers can enable them to execute the tasks and access reports specific to their country—they won’t be able to see, read, or retrieve any reports on employees in other countries.

KarbonPay’s platform enables companies to access their data in real-time, as they can with most other business activities. Customers typically have immediate access (visibility) from any device, at any time, from any location around the world. But, for global payroll, companies still have to email or call multiple vendors to request access to their own data, which they have to wait to receive across time zones. They often have to pay extra to access the reports from multiple vendors in different languages and currencies. KarbonPay changes that, enabling companies to make data-driven decisions.

“Customers often have to log into multiple government-based websites to make tax submissions every time they run a payroll. We’re able to build integrations right into those tools so that they can submit all their taxes from within our system,” says Price. To make payroll even more seamless, KarbonPay integrates with over 40 HR tools, including market-leading Human Capital Management and Applicant Tracking systems, accounting tools, and more, so that clients can conveniently use the platform without having to switch their core HR applications.

In keeping with modern-day employee expectations, KarbonPay is introducing a unique functionality to enable employees to receive either a portion or totality of their salary in a cryptocurrency of their choice. Additionally, employees can now receive their salaries in various e-wallets, like Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more. The platform also comes with an employee portal, which they can use to change their details, update tax information, and download their payslips and the annual tax forms.

KarbonPay has acquired a time and attendance app, XmartClock, to make payroll a breeze for employers that have thousands of field staff paid hourly. With XmartClock, employees can clock in and out from their phones using facial recognition and geolocation. This way, employers can easily keep tabs on late arrivals, absences, or fraudulent overtime. As XmartClock is integrated with KarbonPay, employers can customize their overtime and undertime policies and seamlessly manage the payroll of all their field employees as the entire process is automated.

Driving Excellence at Every Step

When it comes to customer onboarding, the process of extensive data migration is often daunting and unappealing. The bigger the company, the more the data. KarbonPay eases the client’s journey by assisting them in two crucial aspects—the company offers free data migration to help clients transfer data from one system to another, and also allows them to run free parallel payroll cycles (one with their current service provider and the other with KarbonPay) so that they can see the benefits for themselves and be confident about adopting KarbonPay. “We assign our customers support personnel who will guide them through the migration process and provide them with all the necessary information and templates,” notes Price.

For any issues, customers can reach out to KarbonPay support staff via live chat, email, or phone as and when they need. The company also provides customers with a dedicated support team. Most importantly, KarbonPay allows for support specific to each country so that customers can get a quick resolution to their problems or questions in the language they prefer.

With such unparalleled capabilities, KarbonPay has scripted several success stories since its inception. One of them was a client with over 500 employees spread across eight countries. Although the client’s headcount was not massive, the complexity of maintaining compliance across the different countries resulted in the client paying $350,000 a year to various providers who were assisting them with payroll calculations, disbursements, and more. Moving to KarbonPay’s platform, the client was able to retain the autonomy of their payroll process, draw real-time insights, and customize reports, all while witnessing a considerable cost and time reduction.

A Culture Rooted in Innovation

At the heart of KarbonPay is its diverse, multi-national team of experts that bring great ideas to deliver a superior experience to customers not just in the U.S. but all over the world. The company fosters a relaxed and supportive work environment wherein all team members work in harmony to put in their best efforts. At the same time, KarbonPay is particular about hiring only experienced people who are conversant with payroll processes and technologies. “Our people and their consolidated expertise are critical to the growth of our company. We have been hiring professionals with deep domain knowledge for our software and support teams. They not only help customers to use our technology but also understand their problems at a more fundamental level,” shares Price. “Our sales and executive team comprise industry professionals who bring a wealth of knowledge to the table.

Adding more feathers to its cap, KarbonPay recently won the joint first position in the fintech category at The Go Global Awards hosted by The International Trade Council. Treading into the future, KarbonPay hopes to expand its platform’s capabilities to include more countries and ramp up its sales and service support teams in these locations. Over the next three to five years, the company plans to facilitate automated capabilities for payroll in 50 different countries. With this, global companies can benefit from the convenience that KarbonPay makes possible, allowing professionals at every level of an organization to manage all aspects of their cross-border payroll through one system and make better data-driven decisions. The company is also in the process of fundraising and is looking for potential investors to accelerate its expansion.