ZenPayroll Seeks Painless Payroll Nationwide

By Pete Rizzo (@pete_rizzo_)

Delightful isn’t a word you’ll often hear paired with typically onerous tasks such as payroll management. But if San Francisco startup ZenPayroll is able to succeed in its mission, it could one day be top of mind when businessowners think about this business essential.

“We really believe the underlying building blocks of payroll can be delightful,” Joshua Reeves, CEO and co-founder of ZenPayroll, tells PYMNTS.com. “Twice a month, we’re like Santa Claus helping employees receive their income.”

Though Reeves is keen to use colorful language to advertise his product, ZenPayroll has already put weight behind its words, winning small-business customers in the seven states in which it operates and scoring early support top execs from Box, Dropbox, Yammer and Yelp.

Reeves believes such traction is due to his team’s experience with the payroll industry âˆ’ all co-founders had family members who worked in payroll, and its product-first approach âˆ’ the founders agreed to go unpaid until they created a working payroll system (Jump to 0:10). Today, ZenPayroll offers clients complete compliance, automatic tax filing and 24/7 accessibility from any device, among other features.

Perhaps more importantly, Reeves indicates that ZenPayroll has found the right market for its product. ZenPayroll’s initial target will be the 3 million one to 100-person small businesses that conduct payroll manually, a segment of the market Reeves believes has been underserved by the fragmented payroll industry (Jump to 2:25).

Going forward into 2014, ZenPayroll will focus on aggressively on expanding nationwide, Reeves says. He projects the company could add a new state to its roster every two weeks this year, before turning its focus internationally in 2015. (Jump to 4:54)

Still, the company does need to downplay security concerns. As Reeves indicates, to function at its fullest potential, ZenPayroll requires small-business owners to trust it with all the information it would provide to local, state and federal governments âˆ’ meaning it will have vast stores of essential consumer data.

How does Reeves plan to keep this stash secure (Jump to 6:08), and what’s ZenPayroll’s big picture vision for the payroll industry (Jump to 10:01)? Learn more by listening to our full podcast with Reeves below.

*If you have trouble with the audio player above, click here.

Joshua Reeves, CEO and co-founder, ZenPayroll

Joshua Reeves is the CEO & co-Founder of ZenPayroll, a Silicon Valley startup on a mission to deliver delightful, modern payroll to businesses everywhere. ZenPayroll launched in 2012 and includes among its investors the CEOs of Dropbox, Yelp, Yammer, and Box, as well as Google Ventures and Salesforce. He was recently selected to the 2012 Forbes 30 Under 30 list and previously co-founded Unwrap, a start-up which was acquired in 2010 by Context Optional.