While people are being urged to work from home to curb the cases of coronavirus, Fidelma McGuirk is the woman ensuring people are still getting paid.

With increased requirement worldwide to provide for staff absence and Covid-19 self-containment, Payslip reports employers are turning to its technology to manage their global payroll centrally while working remotely or at home.

“It’s a great opportunity for global employers to standardise global payroll to ensure future efficiency and scalability, as well as immediate business continuity,” says McGuirk, the company’s founder.

Co Mayo-based fin-tech firm Payslip provides a single cloud solution for multinational companies to pay their employees easily around the world.

“If you are a multinational employer and you outsource your payroll in different countries, there was no solution or software available to help you organise or manage that global payroll process,” says McGuirk. This spurred her to set up this business.

“It’s a very pro-business, positive town and all the facilities that we need are here, but we really just wanted our children to grow up in the kind of a local community we grew up in.”

Fidelma McGuirk

McGuirk is the former chief executive of tax refund specialist company Taxback. There, she had various responsibilities, including international operations director. In this area, she saw there was no easy way for employers to automate the payroll process, especially when they had employees based in different countries.

Taking the leap and forming her own company happened because of another defining life choice for McGuirk. The entrepreneur had no business or family ties in Co Mayo but decided to move to Westport with her husband and children to get way form “Dublin corporate life.”

The native of Co Wexford is an avid hiker and surfer along with her husband and their passion was passed on to their children. They frequently went to Westport for the waves and decided to choose the country life of west Mayo over the city to raise their kids.

After making the move, she thought about problems businesses face that could be addressed with the skills and strengths she had in her arsenal.

“It’s a very pro-business, positive town and all the facilities that we need are here, but we really just wanted our children to grow up in the kind of a local community we grew up in,” says McGuirk.

While settling into Westport, she looked at the scale of multinational companies and how difficult it is to manage payrolls for all their employees.

“If you took an Irish company for example, they’d grow into the UK first, maybe into the US then maybe into different European countries – and they end up having a multiple of different payroll providers in different countries, usually organised by one person back in HQ,” she says, adding that this means significant amounts of data and spreadsheets being shared across emails.

McGuirk has previous experience setting up a software as a service (SaaS) company before she established Payslip. The businesswoman founded Sprintax, a self-prep tax software service for students.

Payslip was borne when McGuirk created an employer platform that automates the management of the payroll process, as well as compliance calendars, across different countries. This platform then integrates all the data from the HR software of a specific multinational.  

McGuirk began the business alone with just two core hires. She did receive support from the Local Enterprise Office in Mayo, Enterprise Ireland and WestBIC, the business innovation centre based in Galway.

Healthy figures for 2020 growth

McGuirk funded the company herself for two years before seeking funding elsewhere. Investment into the company has reached around €4 million. In 2018, McGuirk received €1 million in seed investment in a fundraising round led by Frontline Ventures. Tribal VC, HBAN Bloom Equity and Enterprise Ireland also participated in the funding round.

McGuirk raised further funding amounting to nearly €3 million earlier this month. Some €2.7 million was raised in a Series A investment round. This round included participation from the same investors McGuirk had in 2018. McGuirk invested the rest herself.

The recent investment will go towards growing the Payslip team, especially as McGuirk has ambitious plans to accelerate client acquisition across Europe and the US.

McGuirk hopes her staff will grow to 94 by the end of 2022. Her Mayo headquarters currently employs 23 people as well as nine employees working in a Bulgaria subsidiary.

With money recently raised, Fidelma hired Mary Holland, who is the company’s new senior executive based in California. Holland is now Payslip’s chief customer officer. A new senior sales executive for Europe was appointed and will take up the role in April.

McGuirk now expects revenue for her company to cross the €2 million threshold.

“Every single client that licences our software grew and expanded their usage of it into other countries. So that’s the best evidence that we were right in what we did.”

Fidelma McGuirk

McGuirk’s product is implemented in over 60 countries and is used by 25 multinational companies including LogMeIn, Teamwork, AMCS Group and GetYourGuide to centrally manage their payroll providers across borders.

McGuirk does not want to disclose the largest company that uses Payslip but says it employs up to 170,000 employees in the consumable sector.

“I can guarantee you have lots of their products in your house,” says McGuirk.

McGuirk predicts that by the time all her customer companies are live across the countries they operate in, Payslip will be used in up to 90 countries worldwide.

“Every single client that licences our software grew and expanded their usage of it into other countries. So that’s the best evidence that we were right in what we did,” says McGuirk on the success of her company so far.