Paycycle acquisition update and pricing

We’re delighted to announce Australian payroll provider Paycycle has over 1000 customers. You may recall Xero acquired Paycycle in July.

This is a fantastic milestone for the Paycycle team which is now part of the Xero family. It’s also testament to the team’s hard work given that the product was only launched 18 months ago. We’ve been extremely busy working toward bringing payroll into the Xero core product in Australia. As the co-founder of Paycycle I’ve been tasked with the responsibility to deliver this important project and I thought it timely to give you an update on our progress, as well as our proposed pricing and availability.

The plan had always been to switch Paycycle’s Silverlight framework for the much more broadly accepted technology base of HTML5. Fortunately, the timing of our acquisition by Xero allowed us to focus on this with even more determination and tap into the the fantastic talents of the design team based in Wellington, New Zealand. The result being all the great Paycycle features you’ve come to know in a beautifully presented, Xero style application.

In December or January we’re looking to release the new HTML product. Existing customers will continue to use the application from paycycle.com.au and apart from a significant visual change, all your data, past payroll, payslips and information will behave as normal. For the next few months Paycycle will continue to be a stand alone product until we are ready to release the entire integrated payroll functionality into Xero in Q1 of 2012.

The screenshots above and below give a sneak preview of what payroll in Xero will look like. Notice the style is closer to Xero Personal which is really setting the design standard for web applications.

We’ve also finalised our pricing for the integrated release. For Australian customers only, integrated payroll will be available under the Small Plan for one employee, up to 20 employees on the Medium Plan and unlimited employees on the Large Plan, which also includes automatic superannuation payments. There are no changes to the current pricing for Xero plans.

In nearly all cases those who use both Paycycle and Xero now, will enjoy the benefit of integrated payroll in Xero for the price of a only a Xero subscription. I’m sure you’ll agree this is a fantastic result for our joint customers and partners.

For Paycycle customers who are not Xero customers, we’ll be in touch early next year to work with you on the continuing arrangements. For Xero customers using the existing payrun functionality, you’ll be able to continue as normal for a period of time. Should you choose to move using the new integrated payroll,  that’s no problem, you can do that too.

Having built payroll once, and having received a great deal of feedback about what is good and bad, we’d like to make quite a few changes the second time around. However we’re still quite limited in what we’re able to do due to our primary focus for now being the conversion from Silverlight to HTML5. Once this first HTML5 release has been completed, we’re keen to incorporate even more payroll functionality with great design so that Xero’s Australian customers have the best integrated payroll imaginable.