Payroll Signup Redesign

In payroll, the hardest screen is the first one. The old signup asked companies to fill in over ninety fields before they could produce a single payslip. Most of them never finished.

The Payroll team had no designer at the time, so I owned the whole thing: deciding what to build, weekly planning, meetings with Sales and the activation team, user testing, and quality checks through to launch.

Monthly signups were stuck at about 43 companies. We looked at lost sales, reasons people left, and revenue impact with the Payroll and Sales teams. Two patterns kept coming up.

Companies couldn't see the value of payroll until they ran a full month. The signup form was standing between them and that first run.

The screen for entering employee salaries in bulk, which was confusing to use, was part of the signup sequence. Every company trying to set up for real hit it on day one and gave up.

We benchmarked Personio, Gusto, Remote, and Payfit. Then we gave ourselves a six-week window so we could ship something measurable before the quarter closed.

I mapped out how companies would go through the new signup, designed early sketches for the setup guide, the first steps checklist, and the settings redesign, then tested prototypes with both happy and unhappy customers to see if the flow made sense. The setup guide tested badly in version 1 and well in version 3.

Three pieces and one functional fix.

Setup guide. Walks the company through what they actually need: payroll rules, the changes they want tracked, and the connection to their payroll software. Everything else gets deferred to later.

First steps checklist. A persistent to-do list that suggests what to do after the setup: financial reports, employee updates, connections to other tools. A checklist, not a tutorial.

Settings redesign. The payroll settings page had become an endless unsearchable list. We reorganized it into a navigable page with clear groupings.

Bulk salary entry. This was the wall that blocked the signup. We built a simpler version that let companies assign a salary to multiple employees at once.

Companies signing up monthly went from 43 to 500 in four months. Same product, same sales approach, same payroll software.

Payroll changes processed monthly: from about 2,000 to 7,800.

Companies downloading payroll reports: from about 400 to 600.

The bigger thing is that the flow changed. Companies started finishing their first payroll run the same week they signed up.

Getting people started depends on how much progress they feel, not how much they actually did. The amount of data to enter is the same whether you ask for it on day one or week three. What changes is whether the company feels like the product is giving them something back.

Being part of the planning as a designer changes what you design. When you can decide what to build this week, you focus on the screens that actually move the numbers. The setup guide got smaller every week. That was the whole win.

On a complex product, the fastest fix is usually postponing something, not redesigning it.