Brought on via an acquisition, Symmetry bolsters HCM platform’s expansion strategy.

Headquartered in Westchester, Penn., PrimePay was among the first providers of human capital management (HCM) solutions to focus on SMBs, long before “HR and Payroll” became a hot category for tech investors and startups.

The Challenge

Symmetry Tax Engine (STE), Symmetry Payroll Forms (SPF), and Symmetry Payroll Point (PRP) were already embedded at SyncHR when PrimePay acquired them.

• SyncHR relied on the SPF API to help small businesses onboard new employees, empowering them to accurately complete their federal, state, and local withholding forms with field- and form-level data validation.
• It embedded the Symmetry Payroll Point API for payroll managers to precisely define even the most complex tax withholding situations, based on exact latitude and longitude coordinates.
• Finally, SyncHR relied on STE as its embedded payroll processing and tax calculator engine, available for the U.S. and Canada.

Linda Adams, senior director for payroll tax compliance at PrimePay, had come to the company through the SyncHR acquisition; she had worked in payroll compliance there for about a decade. She was well-versed in Symmetry’s technology and customer support.

However, PrimePay was performing payroll tax-withholding calculations in-house to some degree but found itself needing to offer employers accurate payroll tax calculations for every taxing jurisdiction at every level in every state in the U.S.

“Symmetry takes away all of the guessing out of complex, multi-state taxation rules,” Adams said. “That’s the main benefit. And these days, it’s more complex and changing more often and faster than ever.”

Alabama, for example, passed legislation this year to exempt overtime pay for hourly workers from state income tax effective Jan. 1, 2024 — but only for a year and a half. The law placed new tax-compliance reporting burdens on employers and, of course, will affect employees’ year-end tax forms, such as their W-2 forms.

“The states get very creative in how they deal with taxation,” Adams said. “And they don’t always think about the payroll software providers, how it will affect them, and what has to happen. It may sound simple, but a lot of these things aren’t simple at all.”

The Solution

PrimePay was able to do much more than expand its customer base with the acquisition of SyncHR. The acquisition also enhanced PrimePay’s payroll tax calculation capabilities by adding Symmetry’s products and customer support.

“Symmetry was brought in as part of the acquisition, and it stuck,” Adams said. Initially, PrimePay used Symmetry’s tax withholding forms technology, via the Symmetry Payroll Forms (SPF) API. In the course of that work, PrimePay realized how Symmetry’s payroll tax calculation engine was “very helpful in making sure the in-house system is up to speed with state and local withholding calculations,” Adams said.

While PrimePay continues to use its in-house tax calculation engine for clients that preceded the SyncHR acquisition, Adams also relies on Symmetry technology.

Companies with in-house payroll departments have a whole compliance department, Adams explained. Those teams often include a researcher to stay abreast of all current tax rates and rules, someone to update all of the applicable tax tables, and finally, a member of the development or IT team to implement any changes or new rules.

“So, Symmetry does the work of at least one full-time compliance person, and you could probably say two, and probably more,” Adams said.

The Outcome

Symmetry technology and support “keeps you in compliance,” Adams said. Leveraging Symmetry’s Payroll Forms and Payroll Point APIs to create and process payroll forms and precisely determine the correct taxing jurisdictions for any employee based on their home address are critical to PrimePay’s employer self-service tool, she added.

“They’re tools we’ve been able to incorporate to enhance the PrimePay product,” she explained.

This is especially important considering the increase in clients who have more complicated employee tax situations due to the increase in the number of employees living in different states from where the company is headquartered.

“That’s happening more now since Covid, and with more people working from home,” Adams said. “You need a system to accurately calculate all those taxes at every level. The benefits for the company in being able to do that quickly and confidently are huge. It’s a lifesaver basically.”

Symmetry’s products also give PrimePay users more control over geo-coordinates and other location services to get tax withholding right every time, Adams said.

Clients can have access on their own, and it’s the exception, but they can also change coordinates or other information if they need to make the output more accurate.

“An employee can change their location in the system down to the rooftop level. It’s a really great product, which we’ve promoted. It makes payroll sexy, if you’re allowed to say that,” Adams said.

But for Adams, equally important to Symmetry’s ability to solve “a huge problem like accurate payroll and compliance,” is how Symmetry seems to care for their customers — for people like Adams.

About PrimePay

Since its inception in 1986, PrimePay has evolved into a versatile HCM Software as a Service (SaaS) platform with more than 18,000 clients globally. Its customers primarily turn to PrimePay when they want to stop manually performing a range of HR and payroll tasks, including processing payroll forms and maintaining tax-withholding compliance. Most of its payroll customers have 100 or fewer employees — a singular definition of a “small business.”

The company is privately funded and has expanded its offerings over the years in part through acquisitions. In 2018, PrimePay acquired ProfitKeeper, a cloud-based financial reporting and accounting solution. In 2021, the company acquired SyncHR, a cloud-based technology that allows small businesses to manage core HR tasks, benefits administration, payroll management, and payroll reporting.