The three companions have already gained a lot of payroll experience in their long careers and have found that companies all over Europe are moaning under inefficient payroll administration. With Paybix they want to relieve these companies of this financial and administrative burden.

Paybix focuses on European employers, companies that also employ people abroad. “You must pay those people according to the rules that apply in each of the countries, which have different legislation. And that means that today you must work with different payroll software for each country,” explains Hans Joris, co-founder and CEO of Paybix. “It is a serious challenge for those employers to get all this organized and to pay all those employees correctly. In Belgium alone this is super complex, let alone that you must do this in thirty different countries”, it sounds.

Pioneers

Paybix is now developing the software to bring all the things needed to correctly calculate employee wages together in one handy tool. “The tool shows the companies a total overview of all the people they employ in all European countries where they are active,” says Hans Joris. “It tells you exactly how many people are employed where, how many people work there with a seniority of more than five years, what the total wage costs are, and so on. Figures that are important for healthy business operations and are constantly requested.”

“You have to enter the performance of your employees on a monthly basis,” Hans Joris continues. “You must indicate the number of days worked, sick days, days off, long-term absences due to burnout, for example, overtime worked, end-of-year bonuses, etc. per employee. The typical examples of data that can influence the salary calculation. And afterwards, once all net wages have been calculated, our customers can request a consolidated report with that data across all those European countries. Now, this is not yet possible in the payroll world," it sounds.

Complex problem

Paybix's target group consists deliberately of SMEs. “We are focusing on the smaller entities, up to 250 employees per country, because there is no affordable solution to the payroll problem for this segment of the market today.”

It remains to be seen why the roll-out of such (affordable) software has taken so long. “Organizing a payroll is already quite a complex affair at country level,” explains Joris. “Although it has been automated quite well in recent decades. But if you look at that on an international scale, that's a different story. To this day, this is still a manual function,” Joris says.

“For example, you must request all the necessary figures from each country separately, which is quite a job. All national payroll calculators need their hands and budgets more than necessary just to keep up with local changes. That is a dynamic story.”

“Look at our country, for example. The Belgian government suddenly creates a corona premium. Then that software must be adapted everywhere. And that costs money,” says Joris. “I think that there will then be too few budgets left on an international level to invest in fundamental innovations such as this one,” it still sounds.

Conquer Europe

Another problem facing the payroll world is the enormous number of outdated systems used in the corporate world. “We should not lose any sleep over this, because we outsource the effective wage calculations to our local partners. We can start from a blank sheet because we fully concentrate on the international story. That gives us a lot of wiggle room to shape our ideas and the freedom to develop and design solutions.”

Although the start-up has only just started its half-year anniversary, the people of Mechelen, ex-SD Worx colleagues, see it big. “With our tool, payroll data for thirty European countries can be easily entered and reported. The tool is still under construction, but we want to become an important player in the European payroll field in the long term and make a difference for European SMEs thanks to our software that will be developed specifically for them,” says Hans Joris.

Original source (in Dutch): New Kid On the Block

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