Payfit: how to make payroll easy and painless

Every employee loves the end of the month — salary time. An employer doesn't necessarily share a sentiment. Salary payout isn't a simple money transfer from one account to another. Doing it correctly and labour law compliant requires the expertise of an in-house or a freelance professional. And given the recurring and repetitive nature of the activity, it was surely a wild dream of many to automate the process.

French startup Payfit did exactly that by automating the creation and management of payouts and payslips. An employer submits all the relevant employee information into the system and lets Payfit diligently generate personalized payslips in a matter of seconds at the end of each month, remembering to take into account all leaves and remote days submitted by an employee. Straightforward and easy, no sweating over getting all the contributions and deductions right.

End-user interface includes the possibility to download payslips, request leaves, claim work-related expenses and check the company’s hierarchy. It doesn’t need to be overly complicated as the core product sold by Payfit is payout automation — this is where things get techier. Payfit uses a proprietary language called Jetlang to encrypt labour laws and make them computer-readable. A task demanding several hours from a human takes a few seconds for an algorithm. Jetlang can be applied to the subsets of any labour regulation laws, making it easy to implement the solution across countries and continents. After having established a strong presence in France, Payfit has already expanded to neighbouring Spain, Germany and the UK.

Imagine there was no Jetlang. It would have been rather costly to hire accountants and make them generate the documents by hand while claiming it to be done by an algorithm — history knows examples of such ingenuity. No judgement though, fake it till you make it.

Payfit solution is perfectly suitable for SMEs having limited resources at their disposal. It might not be very interesting for the bigshots that have a large department dedicated to all things HR and admin. But even without targeting bigger fishes, the pool of potential clients is huge. Everyone hates paperwork and this pool of everyone is a potential client.

Payfit charges client £49 per month as a subscription fee and a variable per payslip starting from £6 depending on the package chosen. Rather democratic, using Payfit should turn out to be cheaper than hiring a freelance even for a few hours to deal with the papers (did anyone mention machines stealing our jobs already?!).

Payfit found a sweet spot — payroll is recurring, universal and painful across companies and countries. Payfit clients include Revolut, happn and GuestReady. I worked in several startups in France — they all used Payfit. If I had a startup, I would have used it too — it is elegantly-crafted and saves a headache. No wonder Payfit is doing very well — they’ve recently raised €70 million and are growing at an exponential rate.