ZenPayroll Partners With A Dozen Other SMB Back-Office Tools

Cloud-based payroll startup ZenPayroll wants to improve the way payroll is handled by small and medium-sized businesses, and to provide them with tools they need to do so. But it’s just one part of a broader ecosystem of applications customers use to manage their accounting and finances, so the company is partnering with a dozen launch partners to simplify the transfer of information between clients.

The SMB market is becoming increasingly fragmented, with businesses realizing the power of the cloud and breaking out of using siloed, one-size-fits-all solutions that are mostly tied to desktop-based software. In doing so, businesses are increasingly mixing and matching a bunch of different vendor platforms to find the right combination of tools.

To limit the amount of information that needs to be re-entered across multiple platforms, companies like ZenPayroll are opening up to work better with their peers’ systems. For ZenPayroll that means the introduction of an API to make that process seamless.

ZenPayroll already had partnerships with other players like Intuit, Xero, and Freshbooks to bring payroll information into its system. But now it is opening up integration with a wide variety of other back-office tools already used by many of its customers.

The API is being used by a dozen other SMB providers that span a wide range of tools. They include BambooHR, BayPoint Benefits, Employee Navigator, Expensify, Kin HR, hCentive, inDinero, Insynctive, Maxwell Health, Receipt Bank, SimplyInsured, and Zenefits.

With those partners on board, ZenPayroll customers will be able to connect it to their payroll, benefits, and human resources systems. By doing so, they’ll be able to enter information like benefits or hours worked into one application, and then have it automatically synced with ZenPayroll.

ZenPayroll is growing fast: The company is seeing $1.1 billion in annual payroll go through its system today, an amount which has doubled from just four months ago. Being able to seamlessly connect with other services should help it find more clients, or at least get more businesses on board.

ZenPayroll has raised $26 million in funding since being founded a couple of years ago, which includes a $20 million round from earlier this year. Investors include General Catalyst Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Salesforce, Box founder Aaron Levie, Data Collective, Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston, Google Ventures, and others.