BrightGo delivers scalable payroll for commercial cleaning

Introduction

Janitorial workers make up the fifth largest job category in the United States, the workforce that keeps office buildings, schools, supermarkets, and storefronts clean, presentable, and safe each day. For the companies employing them, workforce size can change week to week. Teams are distributed across sites, schedules shift constantly, and payroll volumes can spike without warning.

BrightGo is the all-in-one janitorial management system built for cleaning companies navigating growth, client churn, labor inefficiencies, and rising customer expectations. The platform unifies operations, payroll, and accounting with real-time insights that protect margins and boost retention, helping janitorial businesses run smarter at every stage of growth.

As BrightGo moved upmarket and began supporting larger cleaning companies, those with 50 to 1,000+ workers, client expectations around payroll changed. They needed a payroll experience that could handle high-volume runs, fluctuating headcounts, and enterprise-scale complexity without slowing teams down.

Challenge

Most payroll products work well with small workforces but the typical payroll product - or embedded payroll infrastructure - just isn’t designed for running payroll for hundreds of workers at a time. BrightGo needed a solution that would solve for larger employers and keep up from a performance and a usability perspective. 

“Salsa actually built a new front end UI that was designed for large employers like the customers we serve and perform at high loads. We found that customers actually expected a large payroll run to be sluggish and we heard so many stories about spending hours making edits before a payroll deadline only for their tool to time out and lose all the data. We needed a product experience that would surprise and delight customers and immediately signal “wow this is an upgrade from what we’ve had.” — Gerald Fong, CEO, BrightGo

Problems in many large employer payroll solutions aren’t just about UX. Ultimately they’re infrastructure problems, and that’s one of the things Salsa has prioritized from day one.  

Solution

Salsa partnered closely with BrightGo’s product and engineering teams to address the root problem, payroll performance at scale.

Together, the teams rolled out Spreadsheet View for Payroll Runs, a responsive, spreadsheet-style interface optimized for large quantities of payroll data. The new experience incorporated fast scrolling, real-time validation, bulk editing, and improved formatting designed for high-volume workflows.

Behind the scenes, Salsa’s backend architecture intelligently loads and caches data to ensure consistent performance, even as payroll size and complexity increase.

BrightGo engineers played an active role in beta testing through the Salsa Sandbox. Their feedback directly shaped improvements to rounding behavior, UI responsiveness, and editing interactions, reinforcing a collaborative, developer-first partnership.

Results

BrightGo’s payroll experience is now ready for market at scale. Clients running payroll for hundreds of workers can complete runs in a fraction of the time, without manual batching, slowdowns, or second-guessing.

"This new view makes payroll feel like managing a spreadsheet: Fast, familiar, and reliable." — Nicholas Crandall, Product Manager at BrightGo

By embedding Salsa’s performance-optimized infrastructure, BrightGo turned payroll from a scaling risk into a competitive advantage, helping cleaning companies protect margins and retain workers in an industry where both matter more than ever.

This is a really big unlock because the BrightGo team discovered that the more headcount a customer has the larger their payroll pain. A traditional product rollout of “start small, start simple” wouldn’t have aligned with business priorities for BrightGo or their customers. Instead of forcing customers to grow into their product roadmap, BrightGo built the right product up front. That decision positions payroll as infrastructure that accelerates their customers’ success.