How Kriya (formerly MarketFinance) ditched outsourcing and brought payroll in-house with Pento

Time-consuming, error-prone, anxiety-inducing – Outsourcing payroll wasn’t working

Before Pento, Kriya's People and Finance team spent ~50 hours per month trying to run payroll. And they were outsourcing. Outsourcing was supposed to reduce the payroll burden, but the manual process that comes with it made everything worse.

Simple issues would need continuous back and forth and take days to resolve. The team had to double-check everything to ensure there were no errors. It didn't help the rigid cut-off dates.

They had to confirm the payroll by ~15th of every month, considering the bureau's cut-off date, the time it takes to process payments via BACS and get internal approvals to transfer the right amount to the bureau for payroll. There was no room for changes.

Onboarding for new starters had to be pushed, sometimes for six weeks, even if they were ready to join sooner. A simple suggestion by Finance to delay HMRC payment till the last date meant another set of back and forth with the bureau. Something went wrong every month, and payroll had become a source of constant anxiety.

Kriya compromised on time, effort, resources, control, and more just to get support from payroll professionals. It wasn't fair, and it was time to change how they run payroll.

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Bringing payroll in-house = more control

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For Aisha Dean, Senior People Coordinator at Kriya, managing the outsourcers had become a full-time job. They hired the outsourcers to run payroll, but the manual process became a burden for her. Payroll was eating up time from her personal life - she planned her vacations according to payday or sometimes had to work during holidays. And at work, payroll was keeping her from impactful, meaningful, and long-lasting projects.

Everyone in the team was well aware of her pain in running payroll. And few even experienced it when they were covering up for her while she was on sick leave or holidays.

When Aisha decided it was time to bring payroll in-house, it was a no-brainer for the team.

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Switching to Pento’s payroll solution

Andrew Finnerty had recently joined Kriya as the VP of People. And when Aisha raised concerns about payroll and mentioned she was bringing it in-house, Andrew had suggested she check out Pento.

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During their demo, it became evident that Pento was far superior to existing solutions. No matter what the bureaus say, the experience would be similar to their previous outsourcer, while ERPs just took them back to the 90s with their dull product experience.

Kriya's confidence in Pento increased when Pento's Sales team helped Aisha and the team realise how much time they were spending with their current outsourcer and what that would look like with Pento. The value-add of Pento became crystal clear very quickly. They also appreciated how quickly Pento responded to their questions and feedback; Kriya experienced firsthand the kind of support they would get as customers.

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How Kriya transformed their payroll with Pento for good

Kriya felt the impact of implementing payroll from Day 1. Payroll would never be the same for their People team, Finance team and their employees.

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Onboarding with Pento: Doing it right over doing it fast

Kriya and Pento were aligned that payroll is sensitive. It needs to be handled with accuracy instead of optimising for speed. And unlike other providers who “promised” to onboard in 5 days, Pento embedded a couple of parallel runs as part of onboarding to ensure employees weren’t affected due to any changing systems.
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No more grunt work with a real-time, automated, and modern system

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Decentralised responsibility: Now that the team is growing, Aisha no longer has to be the only person who knows the ins-and-out of Kriya's payroll. With Pento, her colleagues can access the system and navigate to get their work done.

No duplicate entries: Pento integrates with Hibob in real-time, which meant Aisha and the team just had to make salary or employee changes in Hibob. They would then show up in Pento automatically.

No back and forth: Unlike before, Aisha doesn't keep a record of employee changes. She just goes inside Pento and amends those changes as they happen, in real-time.

No errors, no double-checks: Automated salary and tax calculations meant no room for human mistakes and no need for double-checks.Automated, one-click payments: With Pento, Kriya makes payments to all employees and HMRC with a single click. No more BACS and delays that come with it.

Easy to use: Payroll can get very intimidating but Pento’s modern product interface makes it look easy.
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Reliable support, fast

Pento’s Support team has always responded to Kriya's queries within 30 mins. Aisha also likes that it’s not just an auto-responder but a real human who has assesses and responds to the issue in her context.