ZenPayroll Now Gives Employers A Way To Pay Contractors That ADP Can’t

ZenPayroll launched in December with $6.1 million from a group of new enterprise kingpins. Following the launch of a service for accountants in April, the Y Combinator startup today announced the capability to pay contractors through its platform.

The new service automates the process of paying contractors and doing the required filings with the Internal Revenue Service. With the new capability, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) covers the entire workforce.

With ZenPayroll, independent contractors can be paid through direct deposit and payments with reported at the end of the year on IRS Form 1099. Once a contractor is added, an employer can also record historical payments made outside of the software.

Contractor payments are available immediately through ZenPayroll and pricing is the same for both employees and contractors — $25 per company, plus $4 per employee or contractor, per month. When a company grows past 10 employees or contractors, the rate drops to $2 for each additional person

ZenPayroll will do the proper filing for the contractor workers. Zen Payroll will also make sure the contractor gets a copy for income tax reporting purposes.

There are more than 43 million contractors in the United States. Can you believe that? That’s one-third of the workforce. Most of the work to pay those people is done manually, said Co-Founder and CEO Joshua Reeves. And people make mistakes. Then the IRS fines them. No fun.

The traditional services like Paychex and ADP are just not flexible enough to pay contractors in the manner that ZenPayroll does. But a service like ZenPayroll makes automation inevitable across the entire back-office. Once a part of a process gets automated, it’s often the other parts that follow. We see it across the market. The human touch is great but the humanity can be too often lacking in old systems that treat the individual in a coarse, industrial way. Automation may seem scary, like some robotic sci-fi nightmare. But automation can often make life seem a bit more bearable as we just try to keep up to date and out of the crosshairs of the IRS.