Payroll Platform
Complete payroll system handling salaries, taxes, leave management, and payments for Kenyan businesses of all sizes.
The Result
What used to take three days now takes an afternoon. HR managers run payroll without dreading month-end. Statutory compliance happens automatically. Employees stopped asking “what’s my tax deduction?” because they can see it themselves.
“We used to spend three days every month on payroll. Now it’s done in an afternoon. The system just works.” — HR Manager, Mid-size Manufacturing Company
100M+ KES disbursed through the platform. Zero statutory calculation errors. Days reduced to hours for monthly payroll processing.
The Challenge
Payroll in Kenya is complicated. PAYE (income tax) has five tax bands. NSSF contributions split into Tier 1 and Tier 2. SHIF replaced NHIF with new rates. Housing levy calculations changed. Miss a deadline and KRA comes knocking.
Most businesses we talked to were stuck with spreadsheets. HR teams spent days every month on calculations. Mistakes happened. Employees complained about wrong payslips. Statutory filings were a nightmare of manual data entry.
One HR manager told us: “I dread the 25th of every month. I know I’ll be here until 8pm checking calculations.”
The existing solutions were either too expensive, too complicated, or built for other markets and didn’t handle Kenyan compliance properly.
The Approach
We started by interviewing HR managers and accountants. Not to ask what features they wanted, but to understand their actual workflow. We sat with them during payroll runs. Watched where they got stuck. Asked why they did things certain ways.
The insight: payroll software fails when it tries to be clever. HR people don’t want AI suggestions or fancy dashboards. They want to enter salaries and have everything else calculated correctly. Every time. Without surprises.
“Other systems made me nervous. I’d run payroll and then manually verify the calculations anyway. What’s the point? This one I actually trust.” — Finance Director, Logistics Company
We built the calculation engine to handle every edge case we discovered: employees joining mid-month, salary changes backdated three months, multiple loan deductions, housing allowances that affect PAYE differently. We tested against real payroll data from five different companies until the numbers matched exactly.
What We Built
Payroll Processing Enter salaries, the system calculates everything else. All statutory deductions computed automatically. Generate payslips with full breakdowns. Export files ready for bank transfers and M-Pesa bulk payments.
Employee Management Add employees one by one or upload in bulk. Track KRA PINs, NSSF numbers, bank details. The system warns you if anything is missing before you can run payroll. No more “oops, we forgot their NSSF number” after payments go out.
Leave Management Annual leave, sick leave, maternity, paternity. Employees request, managers approve, balances update automatically. We studied how different companies handle accruals. Some give everything January 1st. Some accrue monthly. Some wait until probation ends. The system supports all of these.
Statutory Compliance PAYE with all 5 tax bands. NSSF Tier 1 and Tier 2 contributions. SHIF, housing levy, NITA. When rates change (and they do), we update the system. P9 certificates and statutory reports generated instantly, formatted exactly how KRA wants them.
The Impact
The platform now handles payroll for companies ranging from 10 to 500+ employees.
Payroll processing went from days to hours. Not because the software is faster, but because HR teams stopped second-guessing the calculations. They trust the numbers.
Statutory compliance became automatic. When SHIF replaced NHIF, existing customers didn’t have to do anything. The system updated, payroll ran correctly, reports generated in the new format.
Employees got self-service access to their own payslips and leave balances. The HR inbox got quieter.
“The statutory compliance alone saved us. No more worrying about whether we calculated PAYE correctly or if NSSF rates changed. It just handles it.” — HR Manager, Professional Services Firm
Team: 3 engineers, 1 designer Timeline: 6 months initial build Stack: Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis Integrations: M-Pesa exports, Bank APIs, Email, Slack