Scalac and Bexio: Delivering Exceptional Tech Expertise

In this case study, you’ll learn how Scalac helped Bexio expand its software app for small businesses by developing and integrating a powerful set of payroll tools.

Bexio has been a client of Scalac since 2018 and is now solely responsible for the development, maintenance, and ongoing testing of Bexio’s payroll services. 

Bexio is a Swiss software company that specializes in fintech (financial technology) and project management solutions for small businesses.

At the time of writing, Bexio employs over one hundred people (including six dogs) and caters to a customer base of 40,000 companies. And that number is increasing by the day. 

Its core product enables SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) to take care of a wide range of tasks, from payroll management to legal consultation to mobile time tracking, within a unified platform. Bexio’s platform is offered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and operates on a monthly subscription pricing model. 

Chief Product Officer Michael Loos said, “Our purpose at Bexio is to make small businesses successful.” Since its founding, the company’s emphasis has been on delivering intuitive, efficient, feature-rich software that enables small businesses to save time and resources while simultaneously driving growth and customer satisfaction.

In 2018, Bexio was experiencing rapid organic growth. To extend its product feature-set, Bexio acquired a startup that specialized in payroll software. The startup’s main customer-facing app, however, was written in Scala, a language that Bexio didn’t have any in-house knowledge of.

At the same time, Bexio’s existing tech stack contained a number of unrealized opportunities for modernization. These opportunities related specifically to potential payroll features and the speed with which they could be integrated into the existing platform. 

Finally, issues arose around reporting. Bexio has always offered multiple reporting tools. And as the app’s feature kit continues to grow, it is important that users are able to access relevant data in an intuitive and efficient way. As such, creating a system in which users were able to consult data about their payroll activities was a priority. 

Data analytics team leader Enzo Coduti said, “There is a natural need for our clients to know about the health of their businesses, which is why we offer reporting in our application.”

Scalac partnered with Bexio in 2018. In the subsequent months, Scalac established three technical teams, together made up of fifteen senior engineers. Each group worked on a specific part of the payroll app’s architecture, features, and implementation framework. 

From the outset, Scalac sought to move beyond a purely technical understanding of the software. It was important for the whole Scalac team to build a shared understanding of Bexio users’ needs. This included a solid grasp of Bexio’s high-level business domains and customer segments and how they related to its payroll tools. 

Over the course of the partnership, Scalac has made a large number of improvements. These include updating Bexio’s tech stack, optimizing build, deploy, test pipelines, and migrating the development environment to the Google cloud. Scalac has also been responsible for implementing several new features, such as accounting integration, automated calculations for social security payments, and electronic forwarding of wage reports. 

Bexio team leader Enzo Coduti said that Scalac has, among other things, helped reduce resource consumption, improved overall maintainability, and driven much greater flexibility in regards to testing and implementing changes. He said that he was looking forward to offering clients some “fancy dashboards”. 

Towards the end of 2020, the three-person founding development team, who designed the original app, left Bexio. Bexio requested that Scalac step in and take full responsibility for the ongoing development and maintenance of Bexio’s payroll management solution.

Because of Scalac’s expertise and experience in relation to the payroll software, along with its extensive understanding of Bexio’s business goals, there was little operational impact as a result of the founding team’s departure. 

Moving forward, Scalac is excited to continue improving and streamlining Bexio’s payroll tools and development environment. 

If you’d like to learn more about Bexio’s payroll solution and the changes and new features that Scalac implemented, take a look at the full technical breakdown.

Equally, if you are experiencing challenges similar to those faced by Bexio, or you are looking for assistance in the development and implementation of your software solutions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to talk!