Empowering small business owners to run payroll
with confidence.

My Role
Lead UX Designer

Challenge
The product lacked tools to enable users to easily maintain their own payroll data.

Project timeline
1 year

People make mistakes all the time, why not in payroll?

Wagepoint is a Canadian fintech company specializing in payroll software designed for small businesses. It serves over 25,000 customers across Canada, including small business owners, accountants, and bookkeepers.

Payroll is like a mirror to a business.
It should be an accurate reflection of the business and their employees.

Life impacts your pay: sick days, leaving work to be a parent, going to Spain, getting a massage - that’s all in your pay stub!

People had no way of correcting
payroll in the 2.0 platform.

Payroll mistakes are embarrassing and time sensitive.
If left uncorrected, lead to costly audits and fines.

problem

why care about payroll data?

Maintaining accurate payroll data is critical for businesses due to its impact on legal compliance, employee satisfaction, financial health, and operational efficiency.

Businesses have a legal obligation to comply with federal and provincial tax regulations and reporting. Payroll data is used to report and record compensation activity within a business.

About 2% of the 24,000 companies that use Wagepoint report at least one payroll related error per month.

process*

Understand

Learn about the current situation, gather and absorb through research.

Align

Process findings and prioritize user needs and goals.

Imagine

Put it all together and create solutions with others.

Test

Validate solutions by evaluating if they deliver on user goals.

*iterative cycle between phases to get to final solution

Ongoing collaboration with key stakeholders like payroll compliance SMEs, CS agents, developers, and Product managers.

challenges

Corrections were completed behind the scenes. In the old 1.0 platform, it was a service that people could pay and wait days for.

Payroll is complex and not everyone is an expert, there are specific relationships and regulations set by the provincial and federal governments that need to be accounted for.

  • users need to protect themselves from overcorrecting

  • users want guidance without feeling like they’re losing control

Accuracy and speed is required, time is of the essence when it comes to payroll corrections.

  • users need to complete corrections swiftly

  • users want to see the progress of their changes right away

Record keeping is vital, for businesses to maintain a paper trial for audits and reconciliation.

  • users need an easy way to track payroll data changes

  • users want to be able to manage reports in one place

The Adjustments feature

Intuitive workflows for correcting payroll quickly while maintaining payroll compliance, with cohesive change log reporting for easy reconciliation.

solution

MacBook with wagepoint UI

Compliance guardrails

  • Guardrails help ease the transition for those who have experienced adjustments as an add-on service in the previous platform.

  • Timely validations keep users safe from missing crucial related changes as they make corrections on their own.

  • These error buffers ultimately help build confidence that workflow captures the complexity of payroll and can back it up.

MacBook with wagepoint UI

Encompass diverse errors

  • Flexibility is a key element when it comes to corrections, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. We built the feature with stretch in mind.

  • Mistakes can reveal themselves at any time. Adjustments supports sudden changes to give a sense of assurance that they can make corrections on the fly, even when it seems to fall out of the sky.