2024 Year in Review: Beyond Payroll, Built for Staffing

This past year has been a transformational one for Zeal. We started the year with a big vision, to clearly define who we are building for, and build the best solution for them. With our foundation in payroll and existing customers like Wonolo and Qwick, we knew that staffing companies are a critical part of the employment ecosystem that our solution solves real problems for. We also knew that we need to build beyond payroll to deliver staffing companies the best-in-class tools they deserve.

With staffing companies as our focus, we dedicated ourselves to building the platform that makes it faster, easier, and better to operate. In October we announced our $15M Series B fundraise to fuel this vision and released the first new tools that improved the onboard, pay, and bill experience.

We’re working to make the experience for staffing companies and their workers better than anything else out there. This year, we released a no-code, custom branded mobile app that delivers the best worker experience. We paired this with ways to pay workers faster and the best onboarding experience on the market including our innovative solution that makes E-Verifying I-9 forms effortless. For the staffing companies and their admins we made it significantly easier to stay compliant with our I-9 experience, payroll enhancements, and benefits administration. We also made the experience for admins better with smarter CSV imports, garnishment automation, and native integrations.

‍
We’d like to thank our team, customers, partners, and investors for your trust and continued partnership.

‍

Onboard

This year we enhanced the onboarding experience dramatically. Our white-label onboarding component was a great foundation for us to build new functionality on to create a fully-branded, unified onboarding experience. Now companies can onboard workers completely without needing to build anything. 

• Remote I-9 with E-Verify - We’re so excited about our Remote I-9 with E-Verify solution. It’s the fastest and easiest way to collect I-9 information and E-Verify workers employment eligibility, right from the workers mobile device. It’s the best experience for your workers and truly effortless for your staff.
• Custom Data Collection - Customize onboarding by collecting whatever data you need. Upload documents, add custom data fields, and get it signed and completed without a worker leaving your onboarding flow. Use our custom attributes feature to collect unique data or specific documents such as certifications.
• Smart Imports - Remove the effort and errors of manual data entry. Upload a spreadsheet and our smart importer matches fields, identifies issues, and makes it easy to resolve issues right in the Dashboard.

‍

Pay

While we continue to build out the best payroll solution for staffing companies, we are also expanding beyond payroll. We have created more functionality that enables staffing companies to pay workers including new ways to distribute wages, automate compliance, and even earn revenue from payments.

• Modern Payroll - We’ve continued to build upon the best payroll software with an improved native tax engine, more compliance functionality, and enhanced flexibility for how deductions are created. With features like minimum wage compliance, overtime compliance, accrual policies, garnishment automation, and deduction templates in addition to thousands of updates to our tax engine it’s never been easier to compliantly run payroll.
• Paycards and Digital Wallets - Instantly distribute pay to a paycard and digital wallet provided by you. Workers can spend with virtual cards or through Apple Pay and Google Pay. Works with your existing payroll or our modern payroll.
• 1099 Payments - We’ve improved the experience for companies who only do 1099 payments, simplifying the Dashboard and expanding options for payments.
• Healthcare Insurance Benefits - Stay compliant and improve worker retention. Your employees get the benefit of having healthcare insurance, while you get the benefit of not having to administer it. We handle the hard stuff and give you a no-code implementation integrated with payroll.

‍

Bill

We heard from our customers that pay and bill functionality are unique for staffing companies. They are directly related which is unlike most other industries. So we started building the functionality to deliver the billing functionality that staffing companies need, starting with an innovative way to improve cash flow management by paying workers with client funds.

• A/R Routing - We’ve created a new way to think about billing: Invoice-free worker pay. Our innovative A/R Routing functionality allows you to use your customers bank account to fund payroll, allowing you to put your own capital to work elsewhere and collect markup later.

‍

Platform

While we’ve made big improvements to our onboard, pay, and bill products - we’ve also improved the underlying platform that enables those products and how companies manage staffing operations. From connecting Zeal to best-in-class tools, to making Dashboard usability improvements, to one of our biggest innovations yet, a mobile app for workers to access onboarding, pay, and more, we're building the best platform for staffing software in the market.

• Integrations - We released nearly a dozen integrations this year spanning ATS, CRM, Benefits, Accounting, and more. This includes the popular Bullhorn ATS and timekeeping platform, Workday for ATS and Accounting, and Quickbooks for Accounting. Looking for a specific integration? We’d love to hear about it!
• Mobile App - This year we delivered a true game changer for staffing companies. A no-code, custom branded, mobile staffing app that you can literally launch in minutes. This is not the same old third-party portal. Onboarding, I-9, benefits, paystubs, tax documents, and more built into a well designed, modern interface.
• Dashboard improvements - We improved usability and reliability by enabling more functionality to be done in the Dashboard in addition to that API. We built better better filtering into the Dashboard tables, enhanced reporting capabilities, created sharing shortcuts, made important data easier to find, and much more.

‍

What’s next?

We’re committed to making Zeal the best software for staffing companies. We are going to continue to make it faster, easier, and a better experience for staffing companies to onboard, pay, and bill. Many of the releases from 2024 will continue to be enhanced in 2025.

• Onboard - Onboarding will become even more unified so everything is completed in one seamless experience. The I-9 experience for workers and admins will receive some big enhancements. We will enable more custom data to be collected and have those capabilities be easier to use beyond onboarding. 
• Pay - We will enhance our pay options to help workers get paid faster, and make it easy for staffing companies to pay faster. When a worker is paid into a paycard and digital wallet provided by you - they will have more options of how to store, spend, and move those funds.
• Bill - We have so many big releases for bill planned for 2025, and while we are keeping the specifics under wraps for now we believe that pay and bill are uniquely connected for staffing companies. 
• Platform - A big focus area for us next year will be integrations ensuring that you can use the best-in-class tools and have seamless workflows across them. We’ll continue to make big improvements to the admin Dashboard so you can manage operations easier. And you can expect to see many improvements to the custom branded mobile apps.
  

To our existing customers, a ginormous thank you; we can’t wait to see what you create with all of these new capabilities. 

If you’re a staffing company looking to upgrade your worker and admin experience with a better way to onboard, pay, and bill please contact us. We’d love to show you how our solutions can help you reduce costs, improve worker retention, and transform operations from a cost center to a revenue driver.