BrightPay's cloud updates are mostly friction removal: onboarding, reporting, payments, payslip explanations, pension flags and tax reporting. There is an AI onboarding assistant called Oscar with a review layer before anything gets committed, and Pay by Bank pulling payments into the workflow itself.
Kendrick Hair's favourite is the least glamorous one. A payslip comparator that shows an employee what changed and why. Anyone who has worked near HR has answered "why is my pay different this month" more times than they can count.
The harder part is the move. A well liked desktop product does not become a cloud product by flipping a switch, and Bright's first cloud version did not land, got pulled and came back a year later.
John Toon's point is that payroll cannot be relaunched whenever you fancy it. In the UK the natural moment is April, once a year. That is a very small window to get a migration right.
From the episode with John Toon, Kendrick Hair of Fishbowl and Leigh Stallard.
Digi-Tools in Accrual World is The Loop's weekly accounting tech podcast, hosted by Ryan Pearcy, John Toon, Indi Tatla, Eriona Bajrakurtaj and Ian Gregory.
Full episodes: https://digitoolsinaccrual.world
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