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    Wagepoint, a Canadian payroll technology company, has expanded its borders to now include U.S. small to midsize businesses (SMBs) as its customers. The company began with a goal of changing the payroll experience for the better for SMBs in its home country, but leaders had their targets set on eventually offering the same practice in the United States.

    As a company, Wagepoint saw that payroll in smaller businesses was often not an easy task for business owners. SMBs with fewer employees may not have had as many paychecks to keep track of, but owners also had less time to spend managing money, organizing timesheets and keeping up-to-date on the various financial software required to run a business. So, Wagepoint set out to create a payroll platform that works with other financial software, is web-based and is simple to use.

    In an email interview, Shrad Rao, CEO of Wagepoint, said that the company’s software works well with other financial software and can be set up relatively quickly for most any company:

    Right now the average size is 11 employees, though we service a number of businesses with just 1 employee and our largest customer has almost 350 employees. We are flexible but primarily meant for 1 – 200 employee sized businesses. …It’s as easy as signing up on our website (Wagepoint.com). Usually a small business with 5 employees can set themselves up in about 30 minutes.

    Because we focus on the customer experience, we built a simple interface that customers navigate with ease without much involvement from our side, unless they have specific questions. As a result, there is no implementation, training or paper work that has to pass hands and create delays in the process.

    The service is offered at a $15 base fee, with an additional $2 per employee with no setup fees or contracts. Also, because the software is accessed via the Web, Rao says business owners can access it from anywhere they have Internet access—even during vacation:

    It is web-based, so you can access your account from anywhere in the world. So you could be vacationing on a beach in Tahiti and still ensure your employees and the IRS gets paid.

    Another attractive feature for SMBs is that employees can access paystubs and personal data online, says Rao:

    … Employees log-in to their own Personal accounts to view their paystubs, change personal information like address/ banking info and can even see their year-end reports (W-2’s) online.

    Wagepoint prides itself on superb customer service. According to Rao, it’s definitely what sets them apart:

    When we survey our current customers, they tell us that our customer service is the biggest differentiator from the competition. To paraphrase something from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, we are a customer service company that just happens to sell payroll software. We would approach any business we built with the same focus on customer service. And the reason we are able to do so well on the customer service front is because as a technology company, we have automated a lot of the back-end processes so that we can have a single point of focus – our customer’s success.

    As far as their support service goes for Wagepoint, its in-app support has been widely accepted and approved by customers. For SMB owners who are intimidated by new technology, Wagepoint may be the simple, safe way to manage payroll. Rao’s information on product support is impressive:

    We are very accessible and approachable from a customer service perspective. In fact, all our processes are built from the customer’s perspective. Most people contact us via the In-app Support we provide via Zendesk. Right now, 85% of the tickets we receive are resolved within 1 hour and we have a 100% satisfaction score. Phone/ email support is also offered though fewer people take advantage of that feature because of the speed of responses via the in-app Support.

    Kim Mays has been editing and writing about IT since 1999. She currently tackles the topics of small to midsize business technology and introducing new tools for IT. Follow Kim on Google+ at google.com/+KimberlyMays6 or Twitter @blumoonky.

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