Its timely that they give a market updater today - which doesnt make pretty reading.
1384 customers covering 7237 employees. So that is 5.2 employees per customer
$72m in payroll processed. So thats $52,000 per customer or $9,950 per employee
Quite clearly their market is the very small employer with employees likely to be seasonal workers. From that we can conclude their sales / marketing costs are going to be huge relative to the number of sales made. Which is a major worry given they only have $240k in recurring revenue in a quarter.
Number of payslips issued = 46,812. Which is a dumb metric as payslips dont have to be issued. The number = 6.4 payslips per employee which doesnt make sense if they are paid weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
(They are certainly over-cooking the payday filing thing. Which is simply just sending a table file to IRD electronically each pay. No mention of Holiday Act compliance which is the real and pressing concern attendees at their Dairy Women Group meetings should have. Given the new minimum wage I would have thought that would have been more pressing - especially given the average rate of pay going through payroll. )
Absolutely they have picked up small employers. They have been quite explicit about targetting the dairy industry and other farmers in the first instance. Their strategy is to have a system for small and medium businesses and SAAS is a good mechanism for achieving this. Now that the Rural Broadband Initiative has brought broadband to most of the farming community, this is viable. Paysauce is still a very small company even if it is highly overvalued. It will need to keep doubling its revenue each year for a while longer yet in order to reach a more reasonable valuation, or else the SP needs to drop dramatically. I still think they are worth tracking and keeping an eye on their growth but without buying until the valuation improves.
If anyone has the energy to calculate their operating margin, then I am interested to learn this. I just know that at present the 12 month ratio of SP to margin revenue still greatly exceeds XRO even if they are given a high operating margin of 85%.
How scalable is this outside of NZ? i.e. do the tax laws in Oz/US/EU make their solution a helpful fix? If no, this puppy will run out of steam real quick....
There are a bunch of companies who provide nice and sexy payroll solutions. They may become successful widely but need to be keep in mind that the competition for this area is so high. Also, the current price doesn't justify anything from my point of view...
I see they are moving in to broader "employment solutions to small and medium sized businesses". A warning flag is when the use the term "employment contracts" when the current recognized term is "employment agreement" (which is of course a contract - but their are tow types of contract at play. The distinction becomes important). Go wandering off to parliament and mention "Employment Contracts" and Labour would have conniptions. And in their prior announcement where thy say " and ensures they they are always compliant" is total bull and misleading.
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