Payroll
A FlexxPay Solution
A simple payroll solution that enables SMEs to onboard their staff and process their payroll through an easy-to-use online platform. The payroll solution was designed to help small and medium companies that still calculate their payouts on spreadsheets, to shift towards a more digital approach.
My Role
As part of FlexxPay's vision to become the #1 financial wellness solution in the region, we knew that providing a payroll solution to employers was a strategic way to acquire businesses and offer them an easier and digital approach to managing payroll.
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I worked with a team consisting of a product owner, UX/UI designer, developers and testers to design and build the solution from the ground-up. The process took around 6 months worth of work and I was involved in the 3 phases from initiation to launch: (1) assessment and design, (2) build and (3) release phases (beta).
Product
While the payroll solution is designed for SMEs, companies of any size can ​register to the platform and instantly begin using it after verifying their credentials. Customers must first register, configure their desired salary components (such as allowances, fixed pay, etc.) and finally onboard their staff by uploading their details to the system.
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The system will automatically generate the payroll cycle for the current month. Companies can view manage their employee details (including work-related and financial information), perform on and off-cycle payments, conduct adjustments on the fly, generate pay slips and more.
Story
At FlexxPay, we offer a financial wellness platform to businesses of any size. The solution empowers employees to access a portion of their already earned salary at any time of the month, before their regular pay day. The solution reduces financial stress for the employee, and provides companies with a more motivated and happier workforce.
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When we decided to expand our employer offering to include a payroll solution, the focus was on solving a pain-point we frequently encountered with our existing customers; paying salaries to employees was very much a manual process with a majority of the calculation done on spreadsheets. With FlexxPay's existing salary advance feature, our business customers would pay their staff their salary minus any salary advances taken throughout the given month.
Based on the client interviews and research conducted, it was clear that our current clients and many of the SMEs in the regional market still lacked a digital payroll system to manage their employee's salaries and payouts. We therefore developed the following hypothesis: the FlexxPay payroll solution solves the inconvenient, time-consuming and manual procedure it takes SMEs to prepare, calculate and process payroll by offering a simple platform to digitize operations.
Assumption Mapping
We spent some time working on our assumption map. The idea of this exercise is to design a better product by understanding the assumptions being made about its desirability, feasibility and viability.
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Here is a snapshot of the assumption map we created during the one of the initial whiteboarding sessions of the project.
User Personas
We developed a number of personas to help us identify who our users are and their needs. Here's a sample of one of them:
User Journey
Here's a rough sketch of the user journey of user interested in registering, activating and using the solution to process payroll. All hand-drawn sketches were later developed into proper user journeys for each scenario using Lucid Chart of Microsoft Visio.
Story Map
Below is a story map of some of the features included in the first release (MVP version) of the product. It was eventually released as beta with a few selected clients.
Product Breakdown
During the assessment and validation phase of the project, we collected enough data to understand where our focus should be: (1) providing a streamlined and simple registration workflow, (2) cover as many salary components as possible and (3) integrate with multiple payment partners to process the salary files with. With these points in mind, we set out to design a simple, straight-to-the-point payroll system.
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The ease of onboarding companies and staff to the platform was critical to achieve. By providing a simple online wizard, companies can register to the service in under 15 minutes. During our market study, we noticed that most of our direct competitors had complex onboarding steps that would often require the competitor itself to onboard the client. As we wanted a more independent approach, where the customer would self-onboard, it was essential to ensure utmost simplicity when capturing company and employee data. This boiled down to identifying the minimal information required and to design the entire workflow to be easy and self-evident. We designed an interactive mockup that was shown to various clients and potential clients - this helped us trim the overall user interface and helped us understand which salary components (such as housing allowances) were mandatory (and which were not).
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Based on the various surveys conducted and our existing business intelligence data from our current customers, we were also able to pinpoint which banks and financial institutions to integrate with.
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Through this approach, we were able to minimize the risk of developing a full-blown solution with bells and whistles that were not really needed (at least in the first few phases). The beta version of the platform achieved its initial use cases: easily onboard companies and their staff, provide a dynamic solution to add/remove salary components, adhere to the local tax rules and regulations, and perform salary payouts through the integrated partner bank or financial institution.
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The full vision and roadmap of the payroll solution consisted of building additional HRMS features that would complement the payment/payout part of the platform. For instance, clients have requested features such as time-attendance and leave management systems. While these will not be included in the initial launch, they have been added to the backlog and prioritized accordingly.
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It took us less than 6 months to take the product from idea to launch. While we did pilot the platform with a few existing clients, the product is considered successful with iterations of additional features planned for future releases.
Key Takeaways
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As a product that started from scratch, it taught me the importance of the "assessment" phase of a product.
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Due to tight deadlines, the experience working on this product helped strengthened my ability to prioritize features and collaborate with the engineering team when it came to brainstorming how to deliver "trimmed down" versions of certain components.
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Having never worked on payroll before, this product also deepened my knowledge on how payroll systems work.
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How to best work with a complete remote development team with team members spread across multiple countries and time zones.
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Improved my design thinking and understanding of UX/UI while working with a very talented Product Designer for this project.
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