We're excited to announce the launch of Salsa's embedded payroll solution in Canada. This launch is a game-changing development for platforms that serve small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across North America. Today, Salsa is the first company to offer payroll infrastructure that serves the US and Canada with a single API.
Our embedded payroll solution is already making waves south of the border in the US, where Salsa is the fastest and easiest way to launch a payroll product. We take the complexity out of calculations, tax filing, and money movement while providing simple ways to build a payroll product experience inside your application. We're proud to mirror all of these features in Canada, which gives platforms a shortcut to launch a fully compliant payroll product for Canadian businesses.
Why support Canada?
We saw requests for Canada coming from two different sources - the first was large software platforms centered in the US market but operating globally. These platforms typically expand to English-speaking countries first. As a result, we saw a familiar pattern where Canada was the most significant international customer base for many US SaaS platforms. The second opportunity we observed was Canadian founders serving the US market who started in Canada and have a considerable customer base there. We want to help all these platforms serve customers with the same feature set, no matter where they're based. Canada was an essential first step in this effort.
Overcoming Challenges to Launch in the Canadian Market
Launching embedded payroll support in Canada is a significant milestone for us because payroll engines are tough to reconfigure after you've built them. Typically, payroll companies in the US can only ever expand to serve other countries if the architecture decisions made early on allow for the everyday things we see abroad: prolific union rules, different time-off tracking, and myriad pension support. Fortunately, we built flexibility into our core. Our team built payroll for ten countries in a previous life and incorporated all those learnings. Launching Canada is an exciting showcase demonstrating what our infrastructure can do.
One of the most challenging things about launching in Canada was not configuring our payroll engine but setting up the rails for compliant money movement. Before 2022, moving money within Canada was easy as the government didn't significantly regulate payroll providers. All that changed due to the Freedom Convoy in 2022 when truckers protested against the country's COVID-19 restrictions. The Canadian government saw these protesters receiving funding via peer-to-peer payment methods from sponsors abroad and realized they had no way to oversee or regulate this money movement. As a result, the government introduced sweeping legislation, making it more difficult for everybody - even payroll providers - to move money in Canada. We began by building a new compliance program from the ground up to ensure our onboarding and monitoring processes were ready for Canada support. But the hardest part was yet to come: we spent almost a year registering with the Canadian authorities, created new banking partnerships, and underwent audits to become regulated as a Money Services Business in Canada.
Bridging the Border to Support North America
Launching our embedded payroll solution in Canada will significantly impact the Canadian payroll industry. As we've seen in the US, Canadian businesses will soon have a choice to move payroll into the software platforms they already use to manage their business. The result will be a considerably better experience and substantial time savings. In addition, by taking the work out of running payroll, we're freeing business owners to invest more time doing what they enjoy.
Moreover, our embedded payroll solution will also benefit Canadian workers. With the software's automated features, employees can receive their paychecks more quickly and efficiently. And we're working on ways to get workers paid more frequently. Additionally, our tax filing feature ensures that employees' tax withholdings are accurate and transparent - reducing the likelihood of underpayment or overpayment. Our features will leave workers paid more often with fewer tax payment errors.
Launching our embedded payroll solution in Canada is an exciting step for us and the broader North American payroll industry. Businesses with operations in the United States and Canada can now use the same payroll API to manage their payroll products meaning more customers get to use more features. We're excited to enable the next wave of payroll products and see them built on both sides of the border.
If your platform or software application serves the Canadian market, now is a great time to think about adding a payroll solution to your feature set. Schedule a demo to get started today.
