2303 - Automation Strategies for Managing Hourly Employees with Celery's Yuval Brot

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0:58With us right now, it's Yuval Brat. Yuval, you are the co-founder and CEO of Celery. You're found on the web at celeryway.com. Yuval, it's great to have you. Thank you. Great being here, Josh. Absolutely. So before we kind of get going on, you know, what Celery is and the work that you do, and I anticipate sharing some really great tips with our audience today, and that is, you know, outside of work. I always love finding out what high-level leaders and kind of passionate founders do or are into currently. I don't know if there's anything that you're currently geeking out on or into or something you've watched you're doing.

1:42Anything unique? I'll tell you what. I think with our name of the company, it's kind of something I have to do, but I really love cooking. in a very, very serious way, I would say. Tell me more. So listen, I could talk for the next 20 minutes so easily on this. I just made a tagine last night. It was just so spectacular. Tell me about your cooking passion, like what you're into. So for me, it's like, you know, it's a place to bring creativity and it's a place to get like the immediate reaction from the people you're doing it for them. And that's for me, the only thing that equivalent for that would be maybe playing music to people.

2:28But when you're serving food for people that you love and you worked on for a long time, you would see immediately if they love it, if they don't, if they're enjoying what you did. And for me, that's priceless. Yeah. And is there a favorite dish or are there any dishes that you've made recently that you really enjoy making or you've had some great success with? I think my favorite one recently, it's a crispy salmon bun, which I'm making from scratch, including the bun itself, the salmon, all the dressing, everything around it. I love it. Oh, man. All right, I'm going to look that up later. I see you hungry already, Josh.

3:12I am so hungry and I just had breakfast. You know, I don't know if you use AI at all for cooking. I built a, I've not shared this. I don't know if you've ever heard of the TV chef Alton Brown. Of course. Yeah, really, really appreciate a lot of the content that he's created. So I created a custom GPT. If you search it in the OpenAI custom GPT store, it's Alton GPT. I absolutely love it because it's embedded with his personality and his snark. So it's a lot of fun. Yeah. Well, Yuval, let's talk about, speaking of food, let's talk about Celery. What is Celery? So Celery is a system designed to automate payroll review workflow, meaning we're working alongside the payroll, the existing payroll system.

4:05We're taking all data relevant from payroll, time and attendance, any report out there. It can be even like some random Excel spreadsheet. We're taking all this data, we're analyzing it, and within a second, we're spurting out results. The benefit for our users would be something that used to take days, now it's down to minutes. But more importantly, we can help them identify and prevent costly errors. And that leads to a significant impact that we can reduce payroll costs in even 0.5%, 0.6%. now for companies with a few hundreds or thousand employees. That's a big deal. No kidding. So explain why this, like, I'm sure you have some case studies or folks that you've worked with.

4:51Give me like a before and after of like, what's possible here? Okay. So the before would be, and I know it sounds outdated, but believe me, after I talk to, I believe more than 200 CFOs. That's the only practice that I know. It's basically a line-by-line review. You're just covering all the data of the employees. If you have hourly employees, that would be even more complicated because you need to review the timesheets. You're scanning everything from one of payments, missed punches, new hires, bonuses, whatever you have in there, just reviewing all the data, making sure everything is accurate, and then going ahead and making the payment.

5:35With Celery, that process that I just described is going down to 30 minutes, and you have a system telling you, hey, Josh, you have, I don't know, 2 ,500 employees. Those are the 50 that you have a problem that you need to check. That's where you need to spend your time on. It's a classic taking out the needle from the haystack, and suddenly you get a very structured process with a very clear understanding where to spend your time on eventually lead to significant savings because it's so easy to miss those mistakes because, you know, it's manual, it's repetitive. We're human, not very good in doing this task, honestly.

6:15I'm curious, what are the two or three most common mistakes that SMBs in particular make when it comes to payroll that that salary might be able to help mitigate? And again, I'm hoping to kind of maybe just share some best practices generally across the board of like how easily payroll mistakes can happen. Yeah, for sure. So first of all, I would say in general, for as the volume is higher, as much as you have more employees that become a bigger problem, obviously, because it's easier to miss some stuff and you have more to cover. Now, to your question, I would say, first of all, and that's my favorite with the best name ever, that's the fat fingers mistakes.

7:00And that's basically everywhere. It's the mistyping of the pay rate of that bonus amount, whatever. We saw the extra zero. We even saw the two extra zeros, a company who paid 200K instead of two grands. Man, what do you do when that happens? That's bad. Yeah, that's bad. That's bad. Eventually, everything was sorted out, but it was one big mess, and it was to a Chime account, which was really hard to get the money back from. It was a very long story. But honestly, that's an easy one to spot. You don't need salary for that. But you would see those mistypes, the fat fingers, mistakes a lot. That's one.

7:41Second is everything regarding hourly-based employees. That's always challenging. The missed lunch breaks, the missed punches, the coming in late, early. Think about it that you have for every day, like, I don't know, two, three, five rows to cover. You have 100 employees. That's a lot. That's a lot of data to cover, which eventually, you know, every mistake can be small, but it adds up. And it adds up in a way that can hurt the business dramatically. I would say the last one is a very common. It's the fraud activities or not necessarily something that was done by intention, but ghost employees, employees that already left.

8:24But for some reason, somebody forgot to remove them from the system, double payments, paying to the wrong bank accounts. All of those stuff are kind of coming from the same category. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. So, Yuval, I know that there are a lot of people that either they're doing payroll internally, they're outsourcing payroll. What are your thoughts on when is the right time for someone to outsource payroll? I would say that's also a matter of size and volume. I think outsourcing payroll, it's smart. It makes sense. It takes a lot of overload off your shoulders when you're running a business.

9:07but I would say around the 300, 400 mark number of employees, that's a place to take it in-house. And even then, if it's outsourced or not, you cannot outsource responsibility. Always do your own review. Always do it by yourself. Even if you have the best outsource, because at the end of the day, they are just relied on the data that you have. I hear you. Um, golly, that's gotta be really frustrating if you're outsourcing and, uh, you know, all of a sudden you find out that they've been making a mistake for the past, you know, four or five months. And you're like, oh my gosh, it would have been one thing if we had to get that$200 ,000 back, you know, this week we caught the error really quick.

9:55Like, you know, it's another thing entirely to say, okay, well, we've been overpaying, you know, 100 employees, you know,$30 every week for the past, you know, 12 weeks or something like that. That's got to be, that's awkward. And it happens, you know, what you just described, this is very common. Oh, I'm sure. Actually, we have many customers who's outsourcing their payroll, but using us to automate their review process. And, you know, for example, we had the issue of an employee with kind of extra one hour of overtime that wasn't supposed to be there. So, you know, one hour of overtime, the cost was weekly, I don't know, 50 bucks.

10:41Not a big deal. But suddenly a company with 500 employees discovered that actually they have 10 employees with exactly the same issues. and this has been going for the last six months, you do the math. That becomes a serious issue. Mm-hmm. I can see it. Okay, so Celery, where does it fit in and how does it fit in the workflow and generally what are the costs? So basically one of the things that we are proud about the most that we're fitting ourselves to your current workflow. We don't want you to change anything. You have the system that you're using. There's a reason why you use that payroll system, why you use that time and attendance system, whatever.

11:23We are kind of fitting ourselves to your current workflow, and we're just coming in on the perfect timing, meaning you have all data in place. You're about to finalize and go ahead and make the payments. That's exactly the point where salary will kick in, take all the data and just spit out results telling you, hey, Josh, pay attention. You have some issues going on there. That's where you need to spend your time on. generally speaking about cost actually it's on our website we keep a very straightforward approach it's two dollar per employee per month meaning you have 100 employees the cost would be 200 dollars a month and to put some framing around it i would say it's a very cheap insurance for probably your biggest and most sensitive expense yeah i mean just think about i mean and it's not just, you know, let's say it's a bad transaction and, you know, that has just cost to it.

12:22But then there is the emotional capital and, you know, the potential hurt feelings and, you know, relationships. And, you know, those things can be, you know, really frustrating if you're, I mean, one thing, I think one of the first lessons, hopefully, that an SMB founder learns really quick is don't mess with people's money. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I'll tell you what, we keep saying that our benefits are about time savings, that would be more relevant to bigger companies, obviously, then cost reduction of your payroll, that's always a great win. But our third benefit, and that's the vague one that you were referring to, that's a peace of mind.

13:05That's knowing that you're handling your most sensitive expense on the best way possible. Because let's say that you overpay to one of your employees, you're probably not going to take it back. And for a reason, that's their income. You did your mistake, you know, take responsibility. But having that safety net of a very, I would say, structurized and robust payroll review process, that goes a long way. Hmm. So for salary, I see that you're going through some growth right now. What is like, what's the future for salary? And, you know, how do you like, how do you attract clients? How are you building and scaling?

13:50So, we are working a lot in the labor-intensive sectors for the obvious reasons. The vast majority of hourly-based employees of the problem tend to be bigger. Recently, we've been working a lot in healthcare, for example, for those exact reasons. For the future, we see how we're expanding that offering for internal controls in general, not just about payroll. We're actually taking the same concept and now building a product that will automate revenue optimization, cost reimbursement, fixed asset management, basically any aspect of internal financial controls. We're going to build it in in the salary platform.

14:32So you have different agents, each of them dedicated to a specific task in your internal control needs. And for someone that's listening to our conversation right now, what is that engagement, onboarding process? How easy is it to get started? Is there friction? I would imagine sometimes you maybe hear some concerns that it might upend some internal processes. Do you mind maybe talking about integration just a bit? Yeah, for sure. Integration is actually the easiest part, honestly. We built a system that is completely agnostic to the current workflow that you have and the current systems that you're using.

15:18We'll ask a sample of your data, an existing report that you already have will guide you exactly how to extract it. And next time you will meet, you'll see the system already up and running with your data on it, starting getting real value on the very first use. And so to our friends that are listening right now, Yuval, do you have any, so a couple of things. One, resources for people that, you know, might want to just learn from the thought leadership that you're providing right now, or just other things that they might benefit from that they could use. You know, certainly I think anybody would love to, get your vantage from these common errors that happen and how they happen.

16:09Do you have any resources around that? Yeah, actually we do. On our website, celeryway.com, there's a blog with a lot of great tips like best practices for parallel review process, most common mistakes. Actually, the examples that you just gave, we have blog posts just for that. And that's open for everybody. There are a few articles there. I would highly recommend to go there. Awesome. The website, celeryway.com. You can get a quick demo. There are resources on the website as well. You can click on use cases and kind of see how others are using the technology. But you've all brought congratulations on three and a half years of growth and success.

16:54I see you're going through a lot of hiring right now, which is very exciting. So congratulations on that. Again, CeleryWay.com. Yuval, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh.

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