Finjinn was born from the dreams of two wizzards who with their powers of peeping into the souls of businesses, uncovered the biggest pains of small businesses. Payroll! Using years of knowledge from thousands of businesses, their struggles, failures and their inability to adapt to complex tools in the market, the wizards and their passionate team came up with something simple yet spectacularly special. FInjinn was created by the minds that brewed up Paybooks. Minds recongnized by some of the world’s leading companies in different capacities. Ask Oracle, NetSuite, Intuit QuickBooks, ICICI Bank Limited and countless others and they will tell you how. Below is a transcript from a recent interaction between team IT-Voice and Samira Rao, Co-Founder, Finjinn.
Prateek: Give us an overview of Finjinn and its journey so far?
Samira Rao: Finjinn’s journey has been quite exciting so far. We have received more than 50,000 downloads of the Finjinn app within just 6 months of its launch. Several big brands in India have approached us for partnerships, and we are actively working with them to reach small businesses in every nook and corner of India. We have already onboarded some big partners and the press releases for those will be out soon. More importantly, the feedback from the initial customers is very inspiring. They are just loving it. They tell us that Finjinn – the genie – is really fulfilling their long pending wishes.
Prateek: What problem is Finjinn solving?
Samira Rao: Finjinn solves 2 big problems for small business owners. First—Small business owners find it very difficult to comply with laws. There are so many laws in India, and they all vary with states and industries. So, most business owners don’t know what payroll laws they need to follow in the first place. Also, they can’t afford costly compliance professionals or agencies and as a result, they end up paying penalties. Finjinn solves this problem in 3 steps: First – it automatically suggests the payroll laws applicable to small businesses based on their headcount size and location. Second – It automatically calculates all taxes, files the reports on government websites and even makes the payments. Third – It gives a written guarantee that since the business is using Finjinn, it is compliant with all payroll laws and if by mistake Finjinn misses something, it will pay the penalty on behalf of the customer. So, all small business owners can sleep peacefully even if they don’t know anything about laws because Finjinn is doing all the heavy work for them. The second problem is that the current salary payment system in India is broken and involves multiple steps. It is literally frustrating. To pay salaries, a typical small business owner makes the calculations in spreadsheets and then makes salary payments by writing checks, going to bank branches, or using net banking to make transfers one by one. Even if a business is using payroll software, the software stops at telling the business owner how much salary is to be paid, but it doesn’t transfer the salary to employees’ bank accounts. The business owner still needs to make the transfers manually by uploading payment instruction files in bank accounts. So, the current methods are not only painful and time-consuming, but they are highly error-prone and employees getting wrong salary is quite rampant, which is disastrous for small businesses. Finjinn solves this problem by completely automating the employee payments. It automatically calculates salaries and taxes as per the latest laws and even transfers salaries to employees’ bank accounts from its digital autopay account. The only thing a business owner needs to do is to approve the payments by entering an OTP. That’s it. So, Finjinn reduces the time spent in payroll and compliance from 2-3 days to just 2-3 minutes. That’s a dream come true for all small businesses.
Prateek: What is Finjinn offering, and how is it different from its competitors?
Samira Rao: Finjinn is a payroll app that runs payroll & compliance for small businesses on autopilot. Finjinn automatically calculates salaries, files taxes such as PF, PT and ESI, and pays them from a free virtual autopay account. Finjinn’s USP is that it is the 1st product in India that comes with a written guarantee for payroll compliance. It manages end to end payroll compliance for small businesses and if it misses anything, it will bear the cost of all penalties and will pay it on behalf of the customer. That is something no other product offers in India. Secondly, Finjinn runs the entire payroll & compliance on autopilot. Once the setup is done, which literally takes 5-10 minutes, the customer doesn’t even need to login in the app. Finjinn does everything on its own. The customer just needs to approve the payment, and the entire payroll & compliance is run by Finjinn on autopilot. It actually brings down the payroll processing time from 2-3 days to 2-3 minutes.
Prateek: What are Finjinn’s long-term goals?
Samira Rao: Finjinn aims to be a one-stop automation solution for all employee management related functions of small business owners. Doing everything necessary around employee-employer financial touchpoints to delight employees and to provide worry free month ends for small business owners is the goal of Finjinn. Finjinn also aims to lead on the automation front and introduce more HR and Employee Management related functions on autopilot using AI and ML.
Prateek: How technology is automating HR functions across organizations?
Samira Rao: HR tech is automating everything from the onboarding of employees to their exit. Look at our app Finjinn for example. First—It automates the onboarding of employees with the help of an employee self-service app. Second—It automatically creates most tax friendly salary structures for employees based on their CTC. Third—It automatically captures the inputs of attendance, leaves, expense claims, etc. and calculates accurate salaries and then transfers them to employees’ bank accounts. Fourth – It automatically suggests all the laws applicable to small businesses, makes deductions, uploads reports on government websites and even makes all the compliance payments. Fifth – It handles the exit of all employees who have resigned and makes the final payments to them. And these 5 things are just the tip of the iceberg. Finjinn and other HR products automate hundreds of such processes. The possibilities of automation with HR tech are endless.
Prateek: What are your visions for the brand?
Samira Rao: Building an Employee Payments Solution for the first million Micro Category business owners More than 80% of payroll in the sub 30 employees segment in India is in the informal segment which uses ad hoc, manual and incomplete methods and tools to manage employee salaries and payments. Over the next 15-18 months, there will be a big shift towards the formal segment. Rapid digitization and The Govt’s push with the implementation of the new Labor Codes will be a major driver for this shift, just like how the GST implementation resulted in doubling the taxpayer base very quickly. Finjinn has a vision of powering the Micro and Small segment business owners with a very simple and affordable tool to simplify their month ends and enable seamless employee payments.
Prateek: How has the brand navigated through the pandemic? And post-pandemic, how has the brand changed its communication approach?
Samira Rao: Finjinn was in the ideation stage when the pandemic started. Just when we started building the product, the pandemic broke out, and we had to pause everything as there was a big confusion everywhere because of the lockdowns and shutting down of offices. But very quickly, we realized that the pandemic would force a faster digitization and adoption of online tools by businesses. So, in the midst of the pandemic, we all shifted to a work from home culture and started to build Finjinn. All meetings, discussions, brainstorming sessions happened online. During the 2nd wave, we faced a lot of obstacles due to our team members and agencies getting directly or indirectly affected. We overcame everything and launched Finjinn on Aug 21. And the rest is history. Finjinn crossed 50,000 downloads in less than 6 months since launch.
