We had the opportunity to interview Brad Price. Founder of KarbonPay. The company that is making the payroll process easy and available anytime, anywhere.
Interested in investing? They have a crowdfunding campaign live now.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and KarbonPay?
A:  I was born and raised in Cape Town, moved to California, then Texas. I love politics, golden retrievers and travel. I've spent the bulk of my career in HR and payroll, most recently running global payroll operations for clients through Fingo HR, a services company I founded for companies operating multi-nationally.

KarbonPay has developed an automated, cloud-based platform which performs payroll calculations for multi-country employees at the click of a button.  This saves time, cost, and historically reduces error rates to zero, while allowing customers globally to report on one platform.

Q:  How did you get the idea for KarbonPay?
A: The team has over 65 combined years of experience in finance and running payroll in 14 countries over 4 continents. The problems we encountered were consistent and many, while meaningful solutions were few.

With the migration we’re seeing toward cloud technology, it’s more important than ever that mission-critical business operations like payroll are available and accessible anywhere in the world.

With COVID-19 acting as a kind of catalyst in increasing the speed of this cloud migration, it’s more important than ever to have world-class SaaS options available.

Q: What makes your company different from others in your space?
A: Current multinational payroll providers use third-party in-country partners to process payroll data.  This requires a 5-7 business lead-time from the customer in order to obtain, pass along, process and return payroll data so the customer company can pay their overseas employees.  This is time consuming, expensive, prone to errors, and prohibits the customer from running reports on multiple country teams.

Q: What is the main benefit that your company provides to the accounting world?
A: KarbonPay gives control back to the customers by automating the entire process in the cloud.  With a click of a button customers can process their multinational payroll in one platform at the time they need to run payroll.  This eliminates the lead-time requirement, and with less hands in the process, virtually eliminates errors and dramatically cuts the cost while allowing customers to run global reports.  KarbonPay means better control, less cost, fewer errors, and better analytics. We also integrate with cloud accounting platforms so there's a seamless transfer of data from KarbonPay.

Q:  Did you hit any roadblocks that almost caused you to throw in the towel?
A: No, but that's not to say there weren't some difficult days. Finding the right team to fulfil a mission is always one of the most challenging things to do. You’re trying to find the best combination of skill, experience, domain knowledge, personalities, location and enthusiasm to pack into a small team. Knowing the importance of team, we took pains to make sure our team was exceptional. In fact, we underwent 8 months of team-hunting and product planning and research before we finalized our team and built a single line of code. And now we’re reaping the benefits.

Q: KarbonPay is currently in 14 countries. Do you have different languages and currencies available?
A: Our experience is in 14 countries.  KarbonPay currently has the ability to calculate payroll in South Africa and is currently developing in Mexico followed by the Philippines, US, and two additional yet to be determined South American countries.  That said, the platform is available in different languages and currencies.

Q: What kind of traction have you had since you first launched?
A: We launched in September of 2020 and have currently grown to over 50 companies and 1,000+ headcount on the platform.  This month we start a pilot program in South Africa with one of the largest multinational payroll providers in the world.

Q: Are you looking for additional funding or have a crowdfunding campaign? If so, what are you looking for in a potential investor, and how can interested readers get in touch/learn more?  
A: We are currently raising at: wefunder.com/karbonpay. To date we are approaching $440,000 on the platform.  We previously raised $165,000 in our seed round which occurred Q1 2020.

We are seeking a total of $1,070,000 through the crowd fund.  Through Wefunder is the best source of information and to place an investment.  We welcome all to have a virtual meeting with me (founder) and our CFO, Rob Kleifgen by appointment (click here to schedule).

Q: Is there any advice you'd give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?
A: Learn the difference between valuable counsel and noise. For every 100 people you talk to, you’ll find 100 different opinions and perspectives. Some people will think your idea is made of gold while others will deem it useless. Listen carefully to the reasons behind the opinions. Are they domain experts, do they have unique insights into your industry, do you trust this person, are all good questions to ask. In my experience, I have found great value in trying to discern if someone truly believes in me, not my idea. If they back me, I tend to find that their input, whether encouraging or difficult to hear, provides a great deal more value.

That, and never operate in a vacuum. Make sure you have good people around you that you trust to test you.

Q:  Is there anything else you want to share with our audience?
A: Multinational payroll was an inefficient and costly process prior to Covid.  Since Covid, more companies are conducting business online, and more and more offshore labor is being utilized.  The existing system for paying offshore employees is overtaxed and inefficient.   We have created an automated cloud based platform which is the perfect solution to this problem.