Laura Ferreira, COO at Vambora, used Wagepoint and Collage to run payroll and manage HR. But she struggled with how the two pieces of software didn't integrate as smoothly as she would have liked—plus, Wagepoint just wasn't user-friendly.

"I think it was okay for what we needed at a time, because our needs for HR had been very, very simple," Laura said, but she adds that Wagepoint "is very complicated" with "a lot of different tabs—information is everywhere."

"It was a very ugly looking system, that I wasn't really sure that I was doing the right thing. It wasn't intuitive."

The process went like this: Laura would enter the necessary information into Collage, where it would be retrieved by a Collage HR analyst. The analyst would then email Laura to confirm all the information was up-to-date and accurate before running payroll on Wagepoint.

"I felt that I had to do stuff twice," she said. "I had to put the information into Collage. And then I had to reply to the email. And then there was the communication back and forth with email, between two to three emails. She's saying, 'Okay, so we're ready for payroll, let me know if there's any changes.' And then I had to reply saying, 'No, no changes.' And then she had to reply. 'Okay. It's been submitted.' It was just a lot."

Laura adds, "Because our company is really small, I didn't have any issues. But if I did have 10 employees, then it becomes more complicated. That's what I was trying to avoid: Getting to that point, and then having to transfer to a new platform—it would be a nightmare. So I wanted to make sure that when we did grow and hire more people, that we were ready, and we had the right systems in place."

With so much on her plate, Laura needed a solution that would help her automate her workflows and simplify the many manual processes she oversees.

Vambora replaced Collage and Wagepoint with Rippling. Now, Laura finds HR and payroll both straightforward and efficient.

It took me five minutes to [run payroll]. It was so straightforward, so simple. It was just clicking two buttons, making sure the information was correct, and then that's it.

Laura Ferreira

COO at Vambora

With Rippling, Vambora consolidated its systems and cut down the cumbersome manual work from aligning HR and payroll data. Now, Laura can run HR as a one-person team, while leaving time for the more strategic components of her job. 

"My day-to-day is very dynamic. I don't have the same day twice," she said. "The legal part is a big part of my week because I do all the contracts, agreements, and documentation. I've been doing all the regulatory and compliance stuff. I'm in charge of finance, customer experience and testing because we are still in beta. And on top of that I'm in charge of HR,” she said. 

"With all my responsibilities, there's a lot of different individual steps that I have to do," she said. "If I have to do them manually, it takes a lot more time from my day that I could spend doing more strategic and more relevant stuff to the company."

With Rippling, "I've run payroll twice now by myself,” she said. “It was so straightforward, so simple. It was just clicking two buttons, making sure the information was correct, and then that's it. It took me five minutes to do it."

With Rippling, Laura was immediately impressed by the simple and intuitive user experience. An onboarding specialist helped walk her through her first payroll run, and she took it from there.

"I've run payroll twice now by myself. The first time that I did, I was like, 'Okay, do I remember all the steps? Because it's been a month,'" she said. "But it was so straightforward, so simple. It was just clicking two buttons, making sure the information was correct, and then that's it. It took me five minutes to do it."

With new VC investors, Vambora is looking ahead, with plans to hire aggressively and expand into new markets. Rippling will help with that, Laura said.

"We want to grow as fast as we can, when we're ready," she said. "Right now, our employees are only in Canada. But we know our business can and will grow to other countries, and Rippling can help us with running payroll, hiring contractors, and more in different countries and different markets."

For Laura, one of the biggest benefits to using Rippling is that it makes sure she's ready for whatever the future brings for Vambora.

"Part of my job is to make sure that I'm seeing two steps ahead of what we will need, and be ready when the time comes," she said. "That's why we moved to Rippling. I wanted to make sure we were ready to start hiring people as fast as we could, without me having to spend three days out of my week doing all the paperwork, taking care of all the policies, getting signatures, and setting people up in the HR system. Rippling allows me to be fast—without having to hire an HR assistant or HR analyst just to do those things. That's why we made the move to Rippling."

Laura also found she loved other Rippling products that she didn't really know she needed until she started using them, like App Management.

"App management is very, very time consuming when you are onboarding a new person," she said. "With Rippling, I can just select which software or apps the new employee needs, and then they'll already have passwords, email creation, all of those. Before Rippling, I would have to do that manually one by one, and I would always forget some, and then when the person leaves, what do I do? How do I cancel their seat and their email? That was a lot to manage and took a lot of time, and now it's all automated."

Laura is also looking ahead to Vambora's needs down the line, and is interested in taking advantage of Rippling's device management, and benefits administration features as the need arises.

• Time saved: With Rippling, Vambora runs payroll in a brisk five minutes and saves time with automated app management during onboarding.
• Consolidated systems: Instead of using siloed systems for managing HR and running payroll, Vambora unified the processes with Rippling. 
• Staying lean: Vambora’s COO handles all things HR without hiring a full-time assistant—all while devoting most of her time to strategic initiatives.