This husband and wife-led startup is the answer to your payroll needs

Sprout co-founders husband-and-wife Patrick and Alexandria Gentry.

The perks of being your own boss are alluring – you have the freedom to make your own decisions and control your time. But the naked truth is – and this is especially true for first-time entrepreneurs – half your time is spent on administrative crap. By that we mean high volume and boring tasks like managing payroll, which you end up doing yourself if you don’t have staff.

Many small and medium businesses in emerging markets are still doing payroll the century-old way: on paper. Think of the countless calculations involved there. You have to track each employee’s working hours, make all the adjustments for leaves, holidays, overtime, government filings such as taxes and social securities, and recompute for any payroll errors. Some companies are now using spreadsheets, which still require manual work.

Sprout automates the mundane tasks, giving you more time for stuff that matters.

Patrick Gentry, an American entrepreneur who’s based in Manila, experienced the horror himself. So he and his wife Alex, a Filipina, went on and built cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Sprout.

The company is all about automating the repetitive HR and payroll tasks that eat into your workday, giving you and your team more time to do your real work, which is, well, building your business.

Patrick recalls how one client found out they were overspending by at least US$1,700 per payroll run because they weren’t prorating new hires, which means they were paying the employees their salary for the whole pay period instead of only the days worked.

“We go to clients and they have all sorts of errors in their calculations and payroll disputes. For every employee that’s disputing and underpaid, you have one that’s happily taking home an overpay,” he says. “So with our software, we can come in and completely eliminate those disputes and process the payroll literally 90 percent faster.”

Sprout counts PayrollHero and Salarium as two of its competitors in Manila, but Alex claims Sprout was the first one to fully automate timekeeping or what she calls “the real beast” behind payroll. She says employee clock-ins/outs are recorded directly into Sprout, leaving “very limited intervention” from staff. “At the end of your payroll period, you have to check your logs in our system and if you have missing logs, it tells you and asks you what you want to do about them.”

Sprout handles widely varied employee schedules, processes pay, and generates whatever report you need in minutes. It complies with tax codes and general payroll practices, which include monthly employee deductions for health and other benefits. It also stores all your data in the cloud, making it easier for you to maintain and access it. That means you can log into your account from any device anywhere you are as long as there’s internet connection.

How it all started

Like many startups, Sprout was born out of its founder’s own need. It was 2009 and Patrick had just co-founded KMC Solutions, a firm that leases staff to business process outsourcing (BPO) companies in Manila, while remotely working a day job for a Silicon Valley-based startup that develops elearning solutions for large companies like Microsoft and Cisco.

“Our BPO company had around 500 people and we were looking for a payroll software and there was really nothing in the market that was cloud-based… so we decided we would just build it.”

Patrick spearheaded that project and called it Payroll Pie. That same year he put up a website offering a free two-month trial of the software, with the aim of eventually selling it to clients.

Payroll Pie remained as a side project from KMC Solutions until early 2015, when Patrick and Alex decided to spin it off and run it by themselves. At the time, Alex had been helping a former Microsoft guy set up a software company in the Philippines, and she and Patrick were expecting their second child. As classic husband-and-wife startup stories go, Alex was the only free labor Patrick could get.

Not SaaS-ready

Full automation

SF-bound