Earny closes seed round with aim to automate payroll in Switzerland

The round is backed by Polytech Ventures, ACE & Company, and Fusion Partners and will be used to accelerate the launch of Earny’s public SaaS beta in Q4 2021. Earny aims to simplify & automate the payroll process by improving coordination between accountants, SMEs and employees. 

“Believe it or not, accountants, SMEs and employees are still sending emails & excels to each other with sensitive payroll data. That data is then re-typed into payroll software either an Abacus or Cresus.” says Co-founder Bassil Eid. 

“Earny’s platform allows the accountant, SME and employee to enter data securely into a central platform that is automatically included in the payroll.” he adds. “Our solution goes a step further to automate the running of payroll on the 25th of every month if there are no changes in the previous month.” Earny takes away email and provides on platform company & employee onboarding, tracking of payroll changes such as hours & vacations and an accountant dashboard to manage all clients. 

“We were inspired by a U.S payroll startup called Gusto who secured 175 Mil in August 2021 for a 10 Billion USD valuation claiming 200,000 SME customers” states Guillaume Dubray, CEO of Polytech Ventures. “In Switzerland, we have close to 600,000 SMEs which employ 3 Million Swiss. In addition, there are 45,000 newly created SMEs each year. Today alone there are 137 newly created SMEs.”

SMEs typically pay on average 25-50 CHF per employee per month to run payroll with an accountant. That cost is usually baked into a larger set of accounting services charged yearly. The accountant themselves hopes to break even on payroll and really make their margins on value added services. “For our accounting firm, payroll is quite administrative. We collect data, enter that data into software and send data back. This is done manually with emails, excel, PDFs and retyped into our payroll tool. With Earny, we can save time and no longer wait idle for data to come in.” says Sven Roost, Managing Partner at the accounting firm Infeas. 

The landscape for SME applications in Switzerland is changing. “We’re seeing a lot of verticalization in Switzerland with Ledgy, Yokoy and others that are showing parallels to the U.S market '' says Eid having worked as a temp CFO in the Bay Area using U.S based apps for his clients. 

Earny was founded in May 2021 and has already secured a Swissdec Lohnstandard-CH (ELM) 4.0 certified payroll app by purchasing the Mega Salaries product, to which Eid replied, "It usually takes two years to launch a payroll app in Switzerland and get a Swissdec ELM certification. We bought an existing Swissdec ELM certified app, Mega Salaires, and are using that as the backend so we can focus on redesigning the front end. The entire Earny solution is not yet fully ELM certified. We are aiming for certification to the Lohnstandard-CH (ELM) 5.0 and have an excellent starting point thanks to the acquisition of Mega Salaires" Swissdec ensures that payroll software can accurately calculate payroll in all employee scenarios. It is the silver stamp for payroll software.

Earny currently has a private beta running with a set of innovative startups & SMEs. The Earny waiting list continues to grow with anticipation for their public beta due in Q4 2021. The waiting list is a good sign that the Swiss market yearns for a great payroll solution.