When I started DailyPay, I set out to solve a previously untackled problem: to radically change the experience of an employee and enable her to control the timing of her pay, while at the same time not burdening the employer with changing anything about the company’s payroll process. Today, we solve this problem for millions of Americans across great employers like Target, Kroger, Dollar Tree, Six Flags, Adecco, Berkshire Hathaway, and so many others.
In the course of the last five years, I also learned how challenging the payroll process can be. Every day, I am in awe of how tirelessly the hard working women and men of Payroll work to ensure employees receive their pay on time and in full, week after week.
As I became more familiar with the payroll profession, I also began to learn about a host of pain points that exist in the payroll process. At the end of the day, running payroll is simply a clunky process. This is precisely why our own flagship on-demand pay product is so liberating for employers. We offer a daily pay experience for employees, without the employer having to run payroll daily. That means no daily time clock approvals, no off-cycle funding, no payday payroll deductions, and ultimately no risk to the Payroll team.
In partnering closely with our customers, we discovered that off-cycle payments were a major pain point for payroll professionals. These off-cycle payroll payments were being jammed through a payroll system designed to only handle “normal” pay cycles. With that said, these payments were being made in connection with critical employee needs: same day termination pay, pay adjustments, reissued final pay due to a bounced payment, and a whole host of other reasons.
Now, if you didn’t know anything about the payroll profession, one might surmise that these sound like one-offs, or edge cases. And candidly, you’d be right. We estimate that these payments only represent 3% of the payments coming out of payroll. But here’s what we learned when we listened carefully to our payroll professional partners: these 3% of cases represent 97% of the pain. By definition, edge cases are hard. They are weird. They are one-off. And they are time consuming to resolve.
This is why we built Cycle. Cycle turns off-cycle payments into on-cycle payments. With Cycle, an employer simply taps a button on her portal and DailyPay funds, remits, and services the employee in regards to that payment. No more running one-off payments, rushing off to FedEx, cutting paper checks, etc. Additionally, during the global pandemic, it’s neither safe nor practical to ask a payroll professional to go into the office to cut a check.
We estimate in some instances employers can spend $45–50 per off-cycle payment. When you factor in womanpower and time spent, the cost to a company could be in the hundreds of dollars per check. In a time when companies are prioritizing efficiency, this is one expense that can be eliminated by the simple press of a button.
We’ve already received rave reviews from those employers partners of ours who have been patiently working with us through our beta period. To them, we are eternally grateful for their feedback, advice, and counsel.
