In the payroll business, data is anything but standardized. Processes vary from country to country, and are further complicated by industry and company. Lano is a SaaS platform for 2000+ companies that onboards and pays a global workforce via their EOR and payroll solutions. Their work requires them to consolidate varying and sensitive data, each with unique formats and processes depending on the client.
Payroll data itself is tricky to work with, especially with salary changes, gross-to-net calculations, benefits, bonuses, currency conversion and time-off calculations adding extra layers of complexity. Multiply this by the various ways third-parties provide this data or service in the first place, for example, different banking schemes, postal codes or tax laws. The result? A complex data handling process.
However, on the payroll side of their solution, Lano's journey became more efficient when they implemented nuvo. Our Data Importer SDK not only helped streamline their internal data handling, allowing them to focus on their core services, but also enabled them to improve the user experience for their end-client.
Let’s say for example, Lano serves a client in the UK that needs to pay their workforce based in Italy and Spain. This client exports all their data, listing 1000s of rows of employee details (name, ID number, title, location), as well as various remuneration and banking details in the form of Excel and CSV files, which they’ve either formatted themselves or downloaded from a third-party provider. A company based in France whose workforce is based all across the globe will have another payroll format. Their spreadsheets are formatted differently to the first company, using nested data formats.
Now imagine there are 2000+ more unique use cases, each with their own collection of self-structured data sheets, which Lano then has to map, validate, and clean to match their own data model before they can even begin to provide their core services of payroll automation or cross-border payments.
Amongst the many data transformations needed at Lano, Anastasia Kuzmina – Product Lead for Payroll – explains the biggest challenges within their internal data onboarding process, with gross-to-net aggregations being the most complicated.
“With gross-to-net data, it's not just one file you’re working with. It's hundreds of spreadsheets from each specific provider, which need to be aggregated, transformed and imported into our system” Anastasia explains. These files are usually complex and non-flat, making it more difficult to sift through. “Even if one line is changed, it can cause a web of problems,” she adds. This process is so complicated that Lano even needs a whole department for this. Building automations or integrations for each country and industry – given their sprawling global presence – was also not an option. Imagine, 100 countries = 100 integrations!
To help solve their data onboarding bottlenecks, Lano turned to their internal resources. But found it was still “nearly impossible” to find a scalable solution, as those who had the technical knowledge to build custom import scripts didn’t understand everything in payroll, and those who knew everything about payroll didn't have the technical knowledge. In the end, the entire data exchange and migration was a huge source of frustration and misuse of time for everyone involved.
When searching for a solution to help, Lano was mainly looking for something that could perform complex data manipulations, was easy to implement internally and easy for their clients to use and – very importantly – didn’t process or store any data, since they work with such sensitive information.
They also wanted a product with a high level of customer service to help with the more complex tasks. “We never considered building a data importer ourselves; that would have been way too much work and far too expensive”, admits Anastasia.
nuvo met all of Lano’s requirements by offering a fast and cost-effective solution to help transform and align diverse input data into standardized formats for efficient use.
nuvo was the perfect solution for Lano since our Data Importer SDK:
nuvo significantly reduced the need for human involvement in data imports, minimizing errors and freeing up resources. Where data imports used to take one full working day, it now only takes one hour with nuvo = effectively saving almost 90% of their time.
“We’re now able to import a huge amount of data really fast, and all at once. We still need developer resources here and there, but for the most part this has been reduced to a minimum.” Anastasia describes.
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With the added time, they are able to continue to provide a high quality, scalable customer experience to their rapidly growing client base with the same resources. The addition of nuvo to their stack enables them to grow their business operations more efficiently and focus on their core services.
Because the importer is fully customizable and has a clear, non-technical user interface, Lano has successfully implemented the self-service for employee imports and paid time off data. Meaning that instead of having to manually fill in a template, they can now upload any document from any system they exported it from. Overall, this has created a smooth experience for the user and according to Anastasia, “some clients are surprised they can even do this, and then are very happy with it”
Now Lano doesn't need to worry about what kind of data format new customers have since they are confident and know that nuvo can handle it anyway!
The story doesn't end here. Lano has ambitions to use nuvo in the second tier of their business: the recruiting sector. Similar to the payroll sector, their Employer-of-Record (EOR) solution needs to handle sensitive data in diverse formats and structures across multiple countries.
The real beauty of nuvo is its adaptability and scalability; it can be modified and custom-styled to solve a variety of use cases, and across multiple industries. Helping you focus on your core product – and to scale not only your data onboarding processes, but your business model in general.
Are you in the business of payroll, employee or workforce management, or any industry that demands efficiency, security and agility in data onboarding? Perhaps nuvo can help you! Reach out to explain your use-case, and we’ll see how we can solve it.
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