Small and medium businesses come up against numerous challenges during their first few operational years. The challenges are diverse: from finding customers, increasing brand awareness and scaling to hiring talented people, managing workflows, and financial planning.
According to Human resources management: Big problem for small business, many small business owners often lack important knowledge related to labour law compliance and human resources (HR) management. Those who do have adequate knowledge of HR, often do not have a structure in place to effectively support HR initiatives such as recruitment, training and retention, performance management, personal development, and payroll management
Asanify was born from this chaos and complexity in 2019 with a singular aim: to simplify HR and payroll management for startups and SMBs in India and around the world. Founded by Priyom Sarkar and Gaurav Prasad, who recognised and resonated with the struggles of SMBs, Asanify has evolved into a robust platform that can move effortlessly between SMBs to global businesses. It is ranked first globally on the top 20 Easiest to Use Core HR Software, and has graduated from providing Payroll solutions to young startups, to now managing end to end to HR to fast growing global enterprises.
Asanify caters to over 2000+ customers globally, including some public listed companies in India, Australia and the US. Techstars, YC and Sequoia portfolio companies are also among its clientele.
Keeping it simple for SMBs
True to its name, Asanify understood that the key to solving the problem was simplicity – making the process easy to implement and use. At that time, competitors in the market were offering products that would take several weeks to implement. Asanify, in contrast, can be implemented in 24 to 48 hours. The platform facilitates payroll, hiring, attendance tracking, and leave management, in a manner that is both flexible and configurable for the needs of small businesses.
The company offers end-to-end HRMS and automated payouts through a self-serve platform. When the global trend of remote work and freelance collaborations exploded during the pandemic, Asanify expanded to offer global contractor payroll across 200+ countries and also the employer of record services.
The company’s vision isn’t restricted to HRMS. It has gone beyond traditional services to offer compliant infrastructure for businesses to hire and manage employees across the globe without the administrative and regulatory headaches that often come with these endeavours.
Making work wonderful
The company operates on the principles of AWE. ‘A’ stands for making HR and payroll processes agile. This allows for payroll to be executed in a record five seconds, enables quick payouts via the platform to over 200+ countries, and offers 100% compliance.
‘W’ for Work is Wonderful, in which the platform streamlines workflows and makes it easy for businesses to manage HR processes. This includes key areas such as attendance, hiring, time off, documents and tasks, goals and performance management systems. Companies can also customise workflows based on the approval process.
‘E’ stands for engage – Asanify enriches the HR experience through a delightful, user-friendly interface. The platform offers gamified experiences and allows for WhatsApp, MS Teams, Slack, and Google Suite integrations.
From manual to managed
At its core, Asanify is a Human Resources Management Software (HRMS). While HR software has existed since the 90s, it has had little value for SMBs as useability and implementation presented big challenges for smaller enterprises. Founders and business owners often found it easier to hire one individual to undertake these tasks manually, and penetration of HRMS was extremely slow due to these challenges.
The core founding members of the company – Priyom Sarkar, Co-founder and CEO, and Gaurav Prasad, Co-founder and COO, carry over 30+ years of collective experience working for brands like PWC, Reliance Industries, HSBC, GE and Viacom 18. Regular salaries, payslips, job requisition were all part and parcel of the multinational corporate experience. However, in the Indian SME/ SMB space, all these operations were done manually. This was the problem that Sarkar and Prasad wanted to solve – to get SMEs and young startups to adopt automated solutions for their HR processes.
It was just the beginning. Asanify quickly evolved to solve a new problem – working with companies that had some level of automation in place, but were difficult to use. Existing systems had gaps or worked to solve a few HR functions. This feedback led the Asanify founders to make the shift from leave attendance and payroll to tasks such as expense reimbursement, seamless automation of documents, and HR communications.
Asanify goes Global
As the company grew, it began to cater to mid to large size companies – primarily companies with workforce spread across multiple geographies. Starting off with catering to the offshoots of foreign companies, having its office in India with 50-100 employees, Asanify understood this new use case – how to offer services to different countries – from designers in Ukraine to back office workers in the Philippines, full stack developers in India to sales and business managers in Brazil. The company focused on the fact that the need for simplicity transcends borders.
“Whether it’s an India or US-based company, the need for an easy-to-use platform is consistent. Our ethos from the beginning was to simplify HR. We wanted to create an environment where easy to use was the norm. We wanted to offer more configurability, flexibility, and independence, so that individuals can utilise the systems themselves. Simplicity has been our ethos for every parameter,” Prasad says.
A one-stop solution for a global workforce
Going forward, Asanify wants to simplify work for the world. More than half of the company’s business comes from foreign markets, which has prompted Asanify to create solutions to help foreign companies manage their remote workforce. These solutions enable companies to seamlessly handle remote employee management, including payroll in any of the foreign exchanges that they require. Asanify also supports Employer of Record for companies that do not have a legal entity in India. It manages the hiring payroll and compliances for those companies.
The company also wants to focus on payroll and compliance going forward – for both the Indian and international markets. Prasad shares that the company is focused on making Global Payroll seamless, so workers in India, Argentina or France can receive their payments seamlessly, in their currency.
