Accelerating Payroll Software Renovation With a Qualified Remote Team

Our client

Our client represents the company that provides payroll software services to small businesses in Canada. According to the NDA, we must use a fictitious company name and will refer to it as PayPilot throughout this story. The software helps send money directly to employees’ bank accounts, view payment details, generate records of employment, withhold and remit taxes, and more.

Since their first seed round in 2014, PayPilot has raised $14.8 million overall, and after the latest round, the company started a product renovation that required more specialists with project-specific tech skills. Initially, the client needed 5 engineers and planned to scale the team further. Yet, not many vendors could provide such a number of experts immediately.

To fill the talent gap, PayPilot turned to Brocoders for help. Within a couple of weeks, we provided 5 experts and started developing the first module. Throughout the project, we continued onboarding new people and our team eventually grew from 5 to 13 software development experts.

As a result, we created a high-performing product development team that helped our client build a quality fintech solution, eliminating delays and unexpected development costs. Here is what we did.

Challenge: Addressing technical debt to deliver high-quality software

When the client came to Brocoders, they already had a working solution. However, because of the technical debt, PayPilot couldn’t scale the software and implement new features with no hiccups. To improve the scalability and maintainability of the system, they decided to rebuild the backend and frontend from scratch. While their internal team was working on the backend, Brocoders had to focus on the frontend development.

Solution: Building a high-performance software development team

After joining the project, our task was to create a remote development team as quickly as possible to help the client deliver the required functionality on time. We immediately provided 5 specialists, including a Project Manager (PM), 3 React developers, and 1 QA specialist. As the workload increased, we started looking for the missing tech talent on the market as well as onboarding the available engineers within Brocoder’s team.

Project onboarding and code review

PayPilot is a complex payroll platform with tons of industry-specific requirements and integrations with other systems, like QuickBooks and Xero, so we needed time to learn the project specifications in detail. What’s more, a big distributed team, including people from Ukraine, India, and Canada, was involved in the project, so we had to get acquainted with all team members and establish efficient working processes.

To understand the project details and delve into the development faster, our PM cooperated with the Product Owner and the UI Lead on the client’s side. Such collaboration ensured a smooth project onboarding.

Once we felt fully integrated into the project, we started auditing the system and conducting a review of the existing code. We identified some performance issues and scalability bottlenecks, made demos of what we’ve discovered to send to the client's team, complete with our suggestions for improvements.

From here, we established a clear communication process and became fully-fledged members of the PayPilot development team.

Streamlined tech team recruitment

After the code review and bug fixing, we started working on the frontend development, and our workload significantly increased. To fill the talent gap and accelerate the delivery, we started adding new developers to the project.

Our Chief Delivery Officer (CDO) selected suitable candidates from the Brocoders’ team and was working on establishing effective communication and collaboration between all the team members, as well as handling critical issues, like replacements of developers or QA specialists.

Apart from picking developers from our team, we also launched a separate hiring campaign. Each candidate passed a thorough selection process conducted by our HR manager, the recruitment team, and the tech lead in charge of the PayPilot project. Here’s what the process looked like.

After receiving the requirements for candidates from the client, our HR specialist started searching for developers. They conducted initial screening interviews to vet potential applicants and arranged interviews with the tech lead (on our or the client’s side) to check their technical skills. Based on each interview, our recruitment team provided feedback to the client. After the developer was hired, the HR specialist took care of the equipment purchase, to ensure the newly added member could start working on the project without any delays.

As a result, we established a streamlined recruitment process that allowed us to find the required experts fast. But how do you ensure the smooth onboarding of new developers so that they could understand the project specifics fast and follow its quality standards?

Enforcing coding standards through centralized documentation

As we’ve already said, PayPilot is a complex product with numerous technical challenges. To onboard new developers to this project and ensure they adhere to the established coding standards, we needed to create thorough project documentation. It serves as a valuable resource that provides a clear understanding of the product’s requirements, functionalities, and standards. By leveraging Coda, we have centralized this documentation, making it easily accessible and enabling new developers to quickly grasp the project’s intricacies.

The documentation includes reporting rules to ensure consistency and accuracy in the reporting practices across the development team, promoting seamless collaboration and effective decision-making.

The coding standards documented in Coda outline the best practices and conventions that developers must adhere to when writing code for PayPilot. By maintaining a standardized coding style, the project can achieve better code readability, maintainability, and overall code quality. This uniformity also facilitates collaboration among team members, as everyone can understand and work with each other's code more efficiently.

With unified project documentation and coding standards, PayPilot ensures that new developers joining the team can quickly familiarize themselves with the product, contribute effectively, and maintain a high level of consistency and quality in their work.

Delivering a high-quality product despite adversities

Our team took full ownership of the frontend development. A PM from our team set up operational processes, conducted requirements solicitation, and communicated directly with the client’s product managers. Our development was supervised by the UI Lead on the client’s side.

Working on the project, our team developed several modules, including:

Record of Employment

This feature enables the company admin to create a detailed employee form. Typically, this form is required when an employee requests it or when they plan to transition to a new company. It encompasses essential financial information such as payrolls, fees, and vacation days, providing a comprehensive overview of the employee’s financial profile.

First-Time User

It’s a sophisticated wizard that simplifies the process of entering essential information about the company and employees during the initial use of the app. This component intelligently mirrors the main pages and guides the user through the key sections of settings and app functionality, ensuring a step-by-step completion of all necessary details.

Year-End Form

It is a user-friendly feature that allows company admins to create a comprehensive form for their employees at the end of the year, specifically for tax purposes. It provides a convenient and cumulative method for generating and customizing this form to meet the necessary requirements.

Finance

It’s a large module that includes various features for managing microtransactions, such as fee payments, handling insufficient funds, and facilitating tax payments through banks. It primarily caters to risk agents and bookkeepers, providing them with efficient microtransaction management capabilities.

As a result of our work, PayPilot received a high-quality scalable product with great performance and flexibility to accommodate future growth. Despite the disruption caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, our team swiftly relocated to safer areas within the country and abroad and resumed work, successfully delivering the product within the required timeframes.

That’s what the CEO of PayPilot says about that period:

Result: Looking towards future expansion

We established a high-performance team capable of developing high-quality features for a complex fintech project fast, which helped PayPilot to accelerate the development process and deliver the product on schedule.

As of now, we are finishing the beta version for the release in Canada. But we are not stopping here. Next, the client plans to scale the product to the US where the financial management is different from that in Canada. Therefore, the project requires changing accounting and reporting rules, as well as additional tech skills and expertise. And Brocoders are ready to help.