SaaS Payroll Design from Days of Processing Time to Hours

We recognized the frustration F&B companies faced with manual payroll. So, we designed a system that automates the conversion of employee hours into pay, we've given them back the gift of time. We've also taken the stress out of regional compliance by seamlessly incorporating the regulations of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

• Company: Series A Workforce Management SaaS Start-Up for F&B Based in Singapore

• Project: Design and implementation of a comprehensive, regionally compliant payroll system.

• Timeline: 2022-2024 (Focus on the payroll feature development period)

• My Role: Head of Design (full-time), leading a remote team of 7 Product Designers and UX Researchers across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Project Overview

The Challenge

Problem:

We saw that while our platform helped F&B owners with rostering, attendance, and timesheets, payroll was still a real headache. It was a manual, time-consuming, and frankly, frustrating process. This led to some serious issues for our users:

• Time Drain: Imagine spending days just calculating payroll. That's time taken away from running their business, from serving customers, from doing what they love.

• Human Error: With so many manual calculations, mistakes were bound to happen. And those mistakes weren't just numbers on a page; they meant unhappy employees, potential fines, and a loss of trust – the kind of trust that's hard to rebuild.

• Regional Puzzle: Each country – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore – had its own set of payroll rules, taxes, and reports. It was like trying to solve three different puzzles at once.

• Missed Opportunity: Without payroll, we weren't offering the complete solution our users needed. We knew we could do more, especially when other platforms were offering that complete experience."

Business Goal:

Our goal was simple: to make life easier for F&B owners. We wanted to design an automated payroll system that would seamlessly fit into our platform, creating a complete ecosystem. We wanted to take away the stress of manual payroll, improve their experience, and give them a reason to choose us – and grow with us – in the competitive Southeast Asian market.

My Approach

• Team Expansion and Leadership: To truly understand the needs of this region, we needed a team that reflected it. That's why I expanded our design team to seven amazing individuals across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. I focused on clear design guidelines so that the quality for each designer is consistent, and high-quality, remotely.

• Regional Research & Competitive Analysis: We knew we couldn't build a successful payroll system without truly understanding the local landscape. So, we dug into the details: payroll regulations, tax laws, and reporting requirements. We wanted to see things from the users' perspective. We also looked closely at what others were doing, not just to compete, but to learn how we could create something that truly fit the unique needs of the F&B industry.

• User Research & Alpha Testing: To ensure we were building the right solution, we invite F&B 20 businesses in each region to join us as alpha testers. We spent time with them, conducting user interviews, contextual inquiries, and usability tests, genuinely trying to understand their pain points. We saw firsthand how frustrating it was for users to manually do the separation of hours, and navigate complex pay rules. That's why we focused on creating a simpler, more intuitive setup, using visual cues to guide them.

• Iterative Design Process: With our users at the center of everything, we embraced an iterative design process. We used wireframes to map out ideas, built prototypes at various levels of detail, and gathered feedback through usability testing. We didn't stop until we got it right. The eighth iteration was the result of countless conversations and adjustments. It addressed critical user needs while respecting the product's initial limitations. This version felt like a genuine solution, one that users would be happy to invest in.

• Focus on Flexibility and Scalability: Understanding that every F&B business is unique, we built a payroll system that could adapt to their specific needs. It handles everything from different business models and pay structures to the complexities of regional regulations. We made it scalable, ready for their expansion into exciting new markets like Taiwan and Hong Kong.

• Design System Integration: To make the payroll system feel familiar and intuitive, we built it directly into our existing design system. This meant that users would see the same look and feel, from buttons to fonts, and experience consistent interactions. This not only made their experience smoother but also allowed our teams to collaborate more effectively, streamlining development.

The Solution

The payroll system, initially launched with partial automation, now is fully automated after several iterative releases, integrating seamlessly with the existing platform and adhering to government compliance.

• Intuitive, one-time setup wizard for user-specific configurations, including pay rules, deductions, and tax settings.

• Automated calculations for wages, bonuses, overtime, deductions, and taxes, adhering to regional regulations.

• Automated generation of payslips (with regional language support), tax reports, bank transfer files (compliant with local banking formats), and secure, direct payslip delivery to employees' mobile devices.

• Comprehensive reporting dashboards providing real-time insights into payroll data.

Key Features

The Impacts

• 30% Upsell in 3 Months: The payroll system became a primary sales driver, achieving a 30% upsell rate within the first three months of launch, exceeding initial projections.

• Improved User Experience: Streamlined the payroll process, reducing the average time spent on payroll by 80% based on user feedback.

• Increased Customer Satisfaction: Provided a complete workforce management solution, significantly enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing churn.

• Strengthened Market Position: Positioned as one of the leading end-to-end workforce management platform in Southeast Asia based on market cap percentage, attracting new customers and strengthening its competitive advantage.

Learnings

• Managing Remote Teams: I discovered the heart of managing remote teams wasn't just about the tools we use to communicate, it was about having effective ways to communicate. We learned that reducing the frequency of "live meetings" to an async loom video for design review sessions, we found it more effective to free up the time for executions across the team members.

  Designing for Regional Differences:

  We realized designing for different regions and trying to put it into a single configuration of SaaS is super hard, but we're glad that we came across the first directions and changed the way we design the localization configurator. The concept is gradually implemented to the other new localized feature we roll out.