Meet Ashaff Hussain, Senior Product Manager at Bayzat, a company that helps HR and finance administrators automate their day-to-day tasks, streamline their workflows, and manage employee benefits more efficiently.
In this interview, Ashaff discusses how Bayzat’s partnership with Codat has helped them build new features, save time for their customers, and acquire higher-value clients.
Can you tell us about Bayzat and the services you offer to businesses?
Bayzat is a company that provides solutions to HR and finance administrators at companies based in the UAE and KSA. We help them automate their day-to-day tasks, streamline their workflows, and manage employee benefits more efficiently.
How does Bayzat differentiate itself from its competitors?
We don’t just focus on the tasks that our customers need to accomplish. Instead, we analyze the entire workflow and aim to simplify and expedite it. Additionally, we have a thorough discovery process that involves experts from various departments, ensuring that we deliver the best possible outcomes for our clients.
Could you tell us about your role at Bayzat?
As a Senior Product Manager, my primary focus is on establishing a strong product-market fit and increasing customer satisfaction with our product. My team works to ensure that our solutions meet the needs of our clients and make their lives easier.
What challenges were you facing before Codat, and what led you to seek a solution?
In early 2022, we made a strategic decision to shift our focus towards catering to larger companies with 100 to 1,000+ employees. As a result, we received immediate feedback from our sales and customer success teams regarding whether our product offered the necessary features to meet the needs of this new customer base. One of the recurring themes that we noticed was the importance of automation for larger companies, especially when it comes to accounting integrations.
We also learned that enterprise clients have a specific set of requirements that must be met before they agree to a meeting, and one of these requirements is integrations with accounting software.
After conducting extensive research on customer requirements, we discovered that customers were spending approximately one to two weeks every month preparing their payroll data for bookkeeping purposes. This is a significant amount of time and money invested by our customers, and as a result, we aimed to develop an automated solution to streamline this process and push the data to the right journals.
We were also looking to increase the stickiness of our product because the time users were spending interacting with Bayzat Payroll was limited. Accounting integrations allowed us to support post-payroll workflows that kept users on the platform for longer.
Did you consider any alternative solutions?
We realized we could approach the challenge of accounting integrations in one of two ways: building native integrations with each platform or integrating with a standardized API.
Time-to-market was a critical factor for us as we noticed some of our competitors had already integrated with accounting systems. We wanted to achieve feature parity with our competition as quickly as possible, which meant we didn’t have the time to develop individual integrations with different platforms ourselves.
During our research, we came across various options such as Codat, Merge, and a few others. Out of all the vendors that we considered, Codat was the only one that had the specific functionality we required.
The other vendors we considered only offered read access, which was insufficient in addressing the significant issues that our clients were facing. The main challenge our clients were dealing with was the time-consuming process of preparing journal line items and reconciling data in their accounting system. To truly provide a useful solution, we knew we needed to post debit and credit transactions to the journal accounts of our customers’ accounting packages. Codat was the only provider that offered a solution for this.
How has your partnership with Codat impacted your business?
Overall, the experience has been positive, starting from initial sales and product development discussions and ending with the implementation, which was a breeze. We successfully delivered everything within two to three months, including integrations with Xero, QuickBooks, Oracle NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics, and ensuring the successful delivery of the nuances of each platform.
Codat has helped us move beyond the opportunity stage of the sale process in key regions. For existing customers, the impact has been phenomenal. Our customers are able to get more value out of our payroll product and save so much time.
How has Codat supported your goal of acquiring higher-value clients?
We have been able to win over larger companies because of accounting integrations.
Before we started using Codat, we faced a challenge where some potential clients were hesitant to move forward with us after an initial demo meeting. However, once we demonstrated accounting integrations and how they work, these clients quickly changed their minds and signed up with us.
As a result, we have been able to increase conversions through the sales cycle by 10-15%.
How has Codat strengthened your competitive position in the market?
Our focus is on providing real value to customers, so we attract and retain them for long periods of time. In order for us to do that, accounting integrations were a must-have. They not only fulfill the needs of our customers but also help us maintain feature parity with our competitors.
How do you think the payroll software market will evolve?
Most SaaS payroll products in the region place a lot of emphasis on integrations, such as automated salary processing with banks and government organizations to comply with local regulations. I only see this increasing in the future.
In addition, we are witnessing growth in the market as more providers are launching fintech products such as Buy Now Pay Later, microloans, and others. The competition is increasing, and the market is evolving. I believe it will be the providers that deliver the greatest value that will emerge as the winners.
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