How LiveCA and Humi’s partnership drives client-focused payroll solutions

LiveCA is a full-service accounting firm with a progressive approach. They leverage technology to minimize time spent on manual tasks, focusing instead on value-added work, and strive to keep accounting as simple as possible.

They also have a dedicated payroll team, made up of Payroll Compliance Professionals (PCP) and Payroll Leadership Professionals (PLP) that manage payroll for 100+ companies.

Their commitment to finding the best technology for their clients paved the need to find a robust HR software partner. The goal was to find a platform that would help clients effectively and securely communicate employee information changes that would affect their payroll, helping LiveCA’s payroll team and their clients operate more efficiently. The solution? Humi.

After first implementing with a few clients in 2016, LiveCA adopted Humi for their own operations in 2017. And in 2018, we marked another milestone in the partnership once the Humi team started work on launching our own dedicated payroll software.

Working closely with Baalqis Hassan, LiveCA’s then Operations Manager and current Director of Financial Services, the firm played a crucial role in shaping the development of our payroll product. Their feedback was invaluable—highlighting essential features and identifying areas needing improvement—to ensure the tool met the needs of their payroll team and clients.

Feedback-driven payroll enhancements

Today, the LiveCA and Humi teams still share feedback through monthly meetings between LiveCA’s Experienced Payroll Manager, Heather Robinson, and Humi’s Payroll Product Manager, Gregory Caskie.

This close collaboration enables product updates that enhance transparency and streamline  processes, making it easy to recommend Humi to their clients. 

”Because we work so closely, we have more insights into and see more frequent updates compared to many other payroll providers. The improvements Humi makes that address the feedback we’re providing allows us to highlight the product efficiency and feature functionality for our clients.”

As an example, Heather points to updates in the employee benefits setup within payroll. Originally, benefits had a year-to-date amount that a user had to input. With LiveCA’s feedback, it was updated to a per pay basis, with the ability to import the benefit amount.

“This process is easier and way better than other platforms. If a client regularly has benefit changes, we can sell Humi because it takes less time to update than on another platform.”

Compliant, streamlined payroll powered by an integrated HR and payroll system

For Angie Elliston, a Senior Payroll Specialist at LiveCA who manages the payrolls and related compliance for her book of clients, the ongoing partnership between the two teams has helped create efficiencies for her day-to-day work.

With a unified payroll and HR solution, the LiveCA team is able to stay on top of changes and compliance needs. Angie mentions Humi’s payroll digest report, detailing all of the employee information changes that directly affect payroll, as a feature that she heavily relies on.

Heather highlights that businesses who may not have a strong HR or payroll compliance understanding can leverage the platform to stay compliant with very specific requirements and employment standards.

“Having both the payroll and HR pieces of compliance talk to each other within your system is huge. Not all systems can manage that very well. Having information like new employees, compensation changes, and vacation tracking feed over to payroll definitely helps us to highlight for clients the benefits of using Humi – especially smaller clients who may not be able to afford multiple different platforms. With Humi, they get one platform that meets all their needs – HR, benefits, and payroll.”

A platform built for the intricacies of payroll processing

When asked what they’d like to highlight about Humi for other accounting firms, Heather shares: 

“Humi has the basis for everything that you really need. It’s a really robust platform that offers a wide array of functionality needed for payroll processing.”

A lot goes into evaluating product solutions so that the LiveCA team can feel confident in recommending a platform for their clients. Among the criteria they review is robust reporting, the ability to import and export data, and identifying that specific payroll intricacies that the team specializes in are properly established (e.g. a clear outline of how earning codes are structured and set up).

“Your reporting is really good. It’s not that you have 25 million different reports, but the structure and formatting of your reports provide all the information to allow us to easily complete most of the compliance and reporting-related work we need to (e.g. benefit reconciliations, EHT and workers compensation filings). With Humi, we can pull one report and manipulate it to work how we want it to, which is really helpful.”

Heather points to year-to-date reporting as an example.

“It’s a good visual, transparent oversight on the report showing adjustments that have been made. For many other platforms, when you adjust the year-to-date, you lose that transparency in the audit details.”

Prioritizing client needs to find the best fit solution

But what makes the partnership work so well is that both teams recognize that a payroll software isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. The answer isn’t always selling Humi as a default, but ensuring the client is being recommended the right solution for their needs.

Angie speaks of one such customer who was interested in Humi, but decided to go with a different solution because Humi didn’t have a specific piece of functionality they were looking for.

“It’s nice to be able to have your reps walk through what Humi looks like, and determine what would be a good fit for them and what wouldn’t be.”

Since our partnership began in 2016, LiveCA has implemented Humi for over 30 of their clients. And with processes in place to ensure our solution matches client needs, a feedback loop for continuous product improvement, and a client experience team to support existing clients, the LiveCA team looks forward to continuing our long-standing partnership to better serve their team and clients.

“When clients ask for our recommendations on their HR and payroll needs, we typically tell them to choose the best app for the job. While sometimes this means multiple apps, we often recommend Humi as their overall platform is robust enough to handle the complexities many small and medium size employers need with an all-in-one solution!”

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