Papaya Global is a cloud-based payroll and HR company. Often called an Employer of Record (EOR) and a Professional Employer Organization (PEO), Papaya is designed to be the middleman for employing employees around the world.
Founded in 2016 by Eynat Guez, Ofer Herman, and Ruben Drong, Papaya quickly raised around $444m and continues to operate out of New York. The unicorn startup has a valuation of over $3.5 billion in just 6 years. The cause of this success? A growing appetite and acceptance for hiring overseas workers.
Hiring overseas is much easier today than a decade ago. This isn’t just thanks to services like Papaya, but it’s because both businesses and workers are more accustomed to working remotely. The likes of Zoom, VPNs and remote access are better understood and normalized. Before jumping into a Papaya Global Review, there is more about Papaya Global to know when considering it for your business.
What is an EOR and why are companies using Papaya?
As mentioned above, an EOR is a little bit like a middleman between the company and its workers. In fact, this isn’t strictly true – the point of having an EOR is that the overseas worker isn’t your worker, but it’s now Papaya’s.
This is tremendously helpful if you have ever researched about hiring someone from overseas. Hiring an overseas worker means that your company now has to adhere to overseas employment laws and compliance, consider tax and legal implications from this, and take on a lot more bureaucracy.
This isn’t just time-consuming and expensive, but it’s genuinely risky, as it’s very difficult to stay on top of all the new compliance that your company is not used to. The benefits of hiring abroad begin to get outweighed by the negatives. That is, until, the likes of Papaya take on all of this legal burden of hiring. Now, you pay Papaya a SaaS fee and of course the wages for the worker, and that’s that.
Papaya encompasses everything that is beneficial about a SaaS. They’re allowing companies to get a demo, with the API automation “connecting the dots” for a 10-minute set up time. This is a no-code solution to gaining sophisticated payroll insight and EOR solutions for global hiring.
Papaya Global Integration and Analytics
It may sound like you’re paying to take the compliance headache away, but SaaS payroll companies offer some additional value beyond this.
Papaya Global can take control of your international payroll, meaning all of this data is centralized and streamlined by them. They will consolidate and standardize this data and produce frequent reports, digestible dashboards, and useful insights regarding payroll. No more pulling data in from different sources and messing about with Excel or Power BI.
Papaya Global offers a lot of flexibility with its software and has many 3rd party partners. It’s possible to integrate the likes of BambooHR, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors. Expensify is also a popular integration, as it allows businesses to track expenses and produce expense reports – this ties in nicely with Papaya’s base Payroll software. Some businesses already use NetSuite for their business management solutions, ERP and CRM. Papaya integrates seamlessly with NetSuite, giving the IT department less of a headache in structuring the different business processes.
API integration is automated, meaning no coding is required. Of course, custom API integration is possible, with experts working for Papaya helping develop tailor-made API automations.
How Papaya stacks up against competition
What Papaya Global does very well compared to the others is that the software is very scalable and the pricing is ideal for startups. It’s cheap to get started as a small business (simply paying per worker as opposed to a base fee). So, adding more workers is simply a matter of paying $20 more per employee per month. They also have some support that isn’t offered by others, such as global immigration consulting services.
One alternative is Remote, which does a good job of helping the hiring of foreign contractors and refugees – the contractor management plan is $29 per month per contractor. There’s a lot of relocation support on both ends, and over 170 countries are supported. Compare this to SAP, which only supports 45 countries and has limited capability as a Global PEO/EOR provider.
One downfall of Papaya Global is that there isn’t 24/7 support or free trial, which is disappointing. But, its platform is unrivaled. It’s evident a lot of thought has gone into being a usable piece of software with great reports and data visualization.
Pricing is transparent, but it could get pricey when building up a larger global workforce. Rippling may appear like a more expensive alternative when hiring one worker, but it could be cheaper when building a larger workforce.