PayrollHero Adventure Engineering Team Grows By +1

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Michael Stephenson

It’s not hard to imagine why people love to visit Beautiful British Columbia. With mountains, ocean and dozens of reasons to spend time indoors and out, those of us who live here count ourselves lucky, and those who visit can’t wait to come back.

Andrew Narkewicz joins PayrollHero

PayrollHero‘s newest staff member is Andrew Narkewicz – a Full Stack Ruby Engineer who tends to live in Ops – thrilled with his career move to PayrollHero in Whistler, where we are headquartered. Andrew attended UBC in Computer Science and most recently worked for Versapay as their Lead infrastructure developer.

What’s a typical work day like, at PayrollHero? There is no typical around here! We know that we get the best ideas from our talented recruits by giving them flexibility. Whether it’s 4-days-on and 3-days-off, or working weekends instead of only weekdays to take advantage time on the hill when the snow is best and the lines are shortest, or longer days with extra time banked for that great pow day, or a long weekend every couple of weeks. Flex-time is even more enticing when you live where the activities seem limitless, and your everyday life feels like a vacation… or at least looks like it to the outside world!

Blackcomb Mountain Pow

Whistler is proving to be a fantastic place to build a business: with its reasonable cost of living, rent, and ease of recruiting people to live and work in a veritable paradise. Whistler is a natural choice for Andrew, originally from Colorado. He loves ‘sledding’ (a casual term given to snowmobiling), which Whistler’s backcountry has plenty of room for! Andrew has joined us to live the best “Whistler Lifestyle” he can, taking every opportunity to play outside, with our blessing!

Don’t think we’re not hard at work, here at PayrollHero! Just because we post [seemingly constant] photos of our adventures doesn’t mean we don’t put in our dues! We’re busy at work, but we set up our business to attract and retain the best sales engineers, developers, iOS and Machine learning engineers, and customer service reps, so that we can create, build and maintain a great web-based payroll program.

Are you fit to be our next Whistler Engineering Team Hero? We are always looking for new teammates – at the office and at play! Drop us a line!

Press Release: PayrollHero.com Secures $1M in Seed Funding

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

PayrollHero.com Secures $1M in Seed Funding To Continue Product Development And Expand Sales/Marketing Efforts In Southeast Asia

PayrollHero’s time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution helps companies manage their workforce through a cloud based, web and mobile solution that is built for today’s employees.

SINGAPORE, Feb. 20th 2013 – PayrollHero, a software company focused on time, attendance, scheduling and payroll for Southeast Asia has announced today that is has closed a $1M CAD seed round of funding from 500Startups, LX Ventures, The Futura Corporation, 8capita Partners, Ryan Holmes (CEO of Hootsuite), Dan Martell (CEO of Clarity), Benjamin Joffe (aka Mr. Asia), Christian Cotichini (Founder of MAKE Technologies) and other angel investors.

With offices in Manila, Philippines and Whistler, Canada, PayrollHero is a subscription based cloud software platform that uses the employees face and GPS location as the metric for clocking in and out to ensure that the right employee is in the right place at the right time. The company enables transparency between employees and management around time, attendance, scheduling and payroll via attendance analytics.

PayrollHero was created out of necessity from company founders Michael Stephenson and Stephen Jagger. They had set up a Philippine outsourcing company and could not find a suitable time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution so ended up building their own. After showing their internal system to other business owners in the Philippines who expressed similar dissatisfaction with the options available they decided to look deeper into the Philippine market and the rest of Southeast Asia.

“There was a really big opportunity in Southeast Asia for a time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution that was in the cloud and built for web and mobile. We set up PayrollHero and set out to become the market leader in this space,” said PayrollHero CEO Michael Stephenson.

PayrollHero currently supports payroll for companies in the Philippines and plans to expand its payroll capabilities to other countries within Southeast Asia in the near future. The companies time, attendance and scheduling solution works worldwide and currently has users in Canada, USA, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.

“We wanted a payroll solution that was cloud based and built for the Philippine business environment, PayrollHero was exactly what we were looking for and took our payroll processing time for 700 employees from 16 days to 5 minutes” – Walden Chu, CEO, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Philippines

With this injection of funds, PayrollHero can add talent to its “Adventure Engineering” team and continue to add new clients to its expanding client base.

“PayrollHero makes payroll sexy, and they make lots of money doing it! It’s one of those few cloud-based services that every business, from SMB’s to large enterprises, can and should use to increase productivity and save costs. The ability to scale PayrollHero is limited only by the number of businesses that want to improve employee attendance, scheduling, and payroll,” said George Kellerman, Venture Partner, 500 Startups

For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.com

About PayrollHero
PayrollHero.com – Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness
Consumer-friendly Time, Attendance, Scheduling and Payroll in the cloud for web and mobile.
We use your employees face as our primary biometric to avoid buddy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to your companies corollaries between productivity and mood. For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.com – http://www.payrollhero.com/press_kit

New Feature: Enable/Disable Email Notifications

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Now within PayrollHero you can enable and disable the email notifications that go out from the system. While you have always had the control to edit the emails, the ability to pick and choose which ones you wanted did not exist – until today. Under “settings” and “email templates” you can edit, enable and disable each individual email that PayrollHero sends out.

PayrollHero: Philippine Feature Set

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

I was asked the other day for a list of features that PayrollHero has for Philippine companies. Here are the main features of PayrollHero for clients in the Philippines looking for Philippine payroll.

If you have questions or want to chat further about how PayrollHero can help your business – feel free to fill in the form at PayrollHero.com and we will be in touch right away.

Time:
Clock In/Out
Break In/Out
Grace Period for Lates

Attendance:
Review attendance
Resolve Attendance
Edit Attendance
Export Employee Attendance Report
Resolves Lates and Absences
Resolves Undertime
Resolves Overtime

Scheduling:
Create Shifts
Create Multiple Shifts
Schedule Calendar
Weekly Scheduler
Paid Day Off
Unpaid Day off
Scheduling Worksites (location)
Non-scheduled clock ins
Holiday
Calendar Notes/Events

Payroll:
Gross and Net Pay Calculations
Tax Computation
Government Mandated Contributions
13th month pay calculation
Calculates Pay for Special Holidays
Calculates Pay for Regular Holidays
Calculates Payroll for all kinds of Holidays
SSS, Philhealth, PagIbig reports (monthly and quarterly hardcopies)
Paysheet reports, payslip reports (Detailed and summary)
Payroll Register ( Breakdown of Payroll, this report allows to specify an arbitrary date range to report)
Bank reports (electronic and hardcopies) PH integrate to your bank own payroll program.
BIR reports (1601C, 2316, 1700, Alphalist (soon)
Employees ID Card Template with company Logo
“Various employment documents
– Government Certificate of Contribution
– Certificate of Employment”
Various Forms ( for employees application in various Government agencies) BIR 1902 ( TIN application, SSSE1 ( SSS application), Philhealth M1A ( Philhealth application), Pag-Ibig FPF090 MDF ( Pag-Ibig application).

Philippine Payroll File Support:
Maybank
BPI
BDO
HSBC
RCBC

Analytics:
Leaderboard
Weather vs Attendance
Home Location vs Attendance

Philippines CyberPress Awards PayrollHero “IT Startup of the Year”

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

The I.T. Journalists Association of the Philippines, also known as CyberPress, held its annual awards ceremony at the Arts in the City events center in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig the other night. The event saw the country’s top technology journalists, guests from the IT industry, PR firms and partners gather for the year end celebration and the annual CyberPress Awards recognizing the Philippines’ top I.T. company, startup, product, story and Lifetime achievement awardee for the year.

It is a great honor that PayrollHero was chosen as the IT Startup Of The Year!

From the press release… “Payroll Hero, a Filipino start-up that is making a name in the international scene, was selected as “IT Start-up of the Year.” Payroll Hero uses employees face as primary biometric to avoid bundy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to companies corollaries between productivity and mood.”

The 2012 Winners:

I.T. Company Of The Year – Samsung Philippines
I.T. Product Of The Year – DOST’s Project Noah
I.T. Startup Of The Year – PayrollHero.com
I.T. Story Of The Year – Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012
Lifetime Achievement Awardee – Diosdado “Dado” Banatao

—
Official Press Release (via daddyjoey.com):

CyberPress Fetes 2012’s Best In Local IT

For launching a number of hit products that allowed the company to dominate the consumer tech market, Samsung Philippines was cited as “IT Company of the Year” by the IT Journalists Association of the Philippines, also known as Cyberpress, during a recent awards ceremony in Taguig City.

The South Korean firm, which rolled out this year popular devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S3and the Samsung Note II, beat tech behemoth IBM Philippines by the slimmest of margins to take the crown.

IBM Philippines celebrated its 75th anniversary this year and was an early front-runner in the race. Known by the moniker “Big Blue”, the company brought in this year Sam Palmisano, its former CEO and chair in the Philippines, and opened two new offices in Davao and Clark, Pampanga.

Although it narrowly lost out to Samsung as the country’s top tech firm, IBM’s first female local chief was named “IT Executive of the Year” by the Cyberpress. Mariels Almeda Winhoffer, who is in her first year in office, was recognized by the IT scribes for deftly leading the company in a number of initiatives, particularly in building up the Philippines as the social analytics hub of IBM.

The DOST’s Project Noah was adjudged as “IT Product of the Year”, a pioneering program that contributed in saving thousands of lives in a year that saw devastating typhoons pummel the country.

Payroll Hero, a Filipino start-up that is making a name in the international scene, was selected as “IT Start-up of the Year.” Payroll Hero uses employees face as primary biometric to avoid bundy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to companies corollaries between productivity and mood.

The passage of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which set off a wave of protests from Pinoy netizens, was the runaway choice as “IT Story of the Year”.

Honored as this year’s “Lifetime Achievement Awardee” for his meritorious contributions to the local and global IT industry is Silicon Valley-based Filipino tech icon Diosdado “Dado” Banatao.

Banatao, who is currently chairman of PhilDev Forum, pioneered a number of PC technologies such as the graphics accelerator chip that are still being used in the high-tech industry. His brother, Victor, received the plaque in his behalf.

Also during the awards night, members of the Cyberpress raised more than P40,000 for victims of Typhoon ‘Pablo’ by auctioning off three major raffle prizes (iPhone 5 from Globe Telecom, iPad Mini from Bazinga, and an Olympus digicam from Metrobank). Chinese phonemaker ZTE, through its local distributor MSI-ECS, also donated 50 phone units for the typhoon victims.

PayrollHero Team Retreat – Saigon, Vietnam

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

Ad-ven-ture En-gi-neer-ing
Noun: An unusual and exciting, experience or activity built around a flexible work schedule.

The PayrollHero team had a retreat this weekend in Saigon, Vietnam. Vietnam is a quick flight from Manila and a fantastic place to visit. We brought our Whistler team and Manila team together and popped over to Saigon.

At PayrollHero, we believe in “Adventure Engineering” and are committed to not only offering flexible work schedules so that team members can take advantage of “snow days” in Whistler or take “long” weekends to bounce around Southeast Asia but to see the world together. (more on adventure engineering below)

This weekend in Saigon, we fed monkeys and alligators, rode scooters, crawled through the Cu Chi Tunnels, ate frogs, saw the war museum and so much more.

We flew photographer Kris Krug in from Vancouver to document our journey through his lens. Kris is a rockstar photographer and this is not the first time we have brought him along on a PayrollHero trip. Last time we did this was to LAUNCH in San Francisco.

Here are just a couple of his photos from Saigon, but to see the whole collection, pop over to our Facebook page and check them out. Let us know which is your favorite!

PayrollHero Co-Founders Stephen Jagger and Michael Stephenson

Most of the PayrollHero team

Adventure Engineering – We figure there is a small segment of engineers out there who value a challenging and adventurous life. These people tend to share a lot of our core values which we try and reflect in our company with Adventure Engineering:

Work from Whistler or Manila (Mountains and Beach / Snow Cones and Mango’s).
Have a very flexible schedule so you can explore and play. (Snow and surf days).
Learn a ton by travelling and bringing experts to us.
Get outside and play together. Season pass and Physical trainers.
Eat and drink together; meals at the office and offsite pub nights.

Are you looking for an “adventure engineering job”? Get in touch with us to chat more about what we are up to and how you might fit in to our unique environment.

Stephen Jagger on the Vespa Foodie Tour

PayrollHero Lead Engineer Piotr Banasik going down into the Cu Chi Tunnels

Michael Stephenson firing an AK-47

GTD for Software Development at PayrollHero.com

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Adam Baechler

We have been practicing different aspects of Getting Things Done (GTD) from David Allen at PayrollHero.com for the past year and in our previous projects at ubertor.com and outsourcingthingsdone.com for the last 10 years. It is a great way to manage all the different items that we have in our minds

I had an opportunity to get a refresher course in the basics from Tim Stringer GTD coach, entrepreneur and founder of technicallysimple.com. We were hosted by the good people at The Office on August 29th, 2012.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed keeping track of all the things you need to do? If you do then you should consider reading Getting Things Done.

My main takeaway from GTD is your brain is great at thinking not at remembering. So you should develop systems that you can trust so that you can get all your ideas, dreams and projects out of your head.

In this article I would like to take you through PayrollHero.com process of GTD. This is our own particular flavour of GTD so feel free to tweak it for your own purposes. As I deal mostly with organizing tasks to be developed by our engineering team I will be drawing many of my examples from there.

The ideal usage of GTD will allow you to maintain your perspective on your goals and control of your tasks. This is done by making decisions on actions and outcomes and regularly reviewing work that you have taken on. We have 5 levels of perspective and do 5 things to do to remain in control of our tasks. Our goal is not do more or less here we want to do what is needed and have a trusted system in place so that we do not lose track of anything and take the appropriate action at the appropriate time.

How We Keep Perspective

Level 5 – This is our Big Hairy Audacious Goal (To coin an over used phrase) for PayrollHero. These are the 3 or 4 reasons and goals we hope to accomplish in the end with PayrollHero.com.
Level 4 – The major theme within PayrollHero.com. PayrollHero has five major themes Scheduling, Rollcall, Attendance, Payroll, and Human Resources. Here we try to define what the vision is for each of these themes.
Level 3 – Features are like a new project that is going to add some functionality to the system. This is were we determine the overall purpose of the feature.
Level 2 – Enhancements are individual tasks that make up the feature
Level 1 – Tickets are similar to enhancements but are smaller in scope. These are usually Bugs, Tweaks, and chores.

How We Maintain Control

1) Collection

We collect all ideas into a central repository for task. For this we use a web app called Asana.com and we use Googles Drive to share assets like pictures, mock ups, and drawings. All these ideas are organized into the perspective levels so they can be evaluated later. Anyone form the team can submit an idea.

2) Processing

All this stuff needs to be processed and evaluated. We set aside a specific chunks of time our different task boards depending on the needed frequency. For example: We process bugs daily but Enhancement, Tweaks and Chore get processed weekly.

3) Organize

We normally do this at the same time that we process new items. This is where we prioritize our Backlog and usually happens right after we have processed all the new tasks.

4) Review

Next we review the other tasks in the list to make sure that we have everything needed so they can be worked on by the appropriate people. This can be done at the same time as you organize all your tasks. This is also made a lot easier if you are able to brake your tasks into chuncks that will only take at most a day to complete.

5) Do

Now that everything is processed, organized, and reviewed the appropriate team member can start to do work. This is our pre-defined work. We have a pretty strict ticketing system so there is very little unplanned work. When it does come up we have to say to ourselves. This is going to distract us from our my main goal today do I have to do it now or can it be deferred until later. 99% of the time it can be deferred until later and gets ticketed. Otherwise it gets incorporated into the ticket that was already being worked on. Lastly it is really important to schedule time into your day and week to define work this is were you can review your tasks

If this looks like work that is because it is, my position is pretty much dedicated to doing this day in and out, but it pays out huge dividends in what we get done and having the trust that we haven’t forgotten anything

Thanks for reading. Do you have any best practices for completing work?

PayrollHero “Judges Choice” at Startup Riot in Seattle

Posted on August 12, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

PayrollHero was invited to pitch at the Startup Riot event in Seattle, WA last week. Along with 29 other startup PayrollHero co-founder Stephen Jagger had 3 minutes on stage, with maximum 4 slides to pitch the judges on the merits of PayrollHero.

After all 30 startups pitched, the judges met to decide on the “Judges Choice” for the top 5 startups. After a few minutes of deliberation, the judges announced that PayrollHero was their choice as one of the “Top 5” startups at Startup Riot 2012 Seattle.

If your interested in seeing the pitch, you can see the video below:

(You will notice I get a bit of a laugh at the start of the pitch. I was lucky to be 26th up to pitch, so had a benefit of watching others and seeing how the judges reacted. Most of the feedback was around the judges wanting to see more of the product. The problem is, none of us could change our slides as they were submitted a week earlier. So when I got on stage, I brought the PayrollHero TimeClock (iPad) with me and handed it to the judges. One of the judges jokingly commented that it was cheating, where I responded saying I thought it was smart)

The Top 5 Startups included:

– https://www.microryza.com – “Give Money To Research That You Care About”
– http://www.quoterobot.com – “Multi-Page Proposals In Moments”
– http://www.vendscreen.com – “Vending Machine Technology”
– http://www.trell.is – “On-Demand Android App Testing”
– http://www.payrollhero.com – “Optimizing Work Productivity With Happiness”

And 2 of them have Canadian roots!

Amazon Web Services Asia Pacific Visits PayrollHero Manila Offices

Posted on June 30, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

Franco Eisma (on the right, boxing) and Dhruv Parpia (taking photo) from Amazon Web Services Asia Pacific dropped by the PayrollHero Manila offices from Singapore to spend some time with our team and to provide solution architectectural assistance. They also ended up doing some training with our inhouse Head Trainer Rei Moralles in the PayrollHero gym.

PayrollHero Pitches in Singapore At Echelon (video)

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

PayrollHero was chosen by Echelon at one of the “Top 10 Startups in Asia” and invited us to pitch with 9 other companies at their big tech conference in Singapore. We attended the conference had a booth in the demo pit and pitched PayrollHero on stage in front of a full house.

We revised our pitch a bit from the Jakarta event the week before. Check it out below, let us know what you think: