When we shipped Tracket Payroll in 2024, it was a quiet release. No keynote, no demo video. Just a checkbox in the People app. Two years later, it processes payroll in India and Canada every month — and it's the app I'm proudest of, even though no one ever buys Tracket because of it.
Payroll is the kind of software that's invisible when it works and catastrophic when it doesn't. A bug means somebody doesn't get paid. A misclassification means a regulator knocks. A rounding error means a class-action. The blast radius is enormous and the upside is "the obvious thing happens".
India and Canada means 14 sets of weird rules
The hard part isn't running payroll in one country. It's running it in fourteen, where each has its own:
- Pay frequency conventions (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, semi-monthly)
- Statutory benefits (US 401(k), UK pensions, PT IRS retention, JP shakai-hoken)
- Holiday pay rules that depend on tenure, day of the week, and astrological alignment
- Termination rules with mandatory payouts that vary by reason for termination
- Reporting deadlines that are spread across weeks of the month
Multiply this by salaried, contractor, intern and equity-comp scenarios, and you have a combinatorial explosion that no spreadsheet survives.
The best compliment we've ever received: "I didn't realize Tracket had payroll until I switched off my old payroll vendor."
Why we built it ourselves
We considered partnering with a payroll provider. We even ran a six-month pilot with one. The integration was fine. The trust wasn't. Customers wanted Tracket to be accountable for the payroll outcome, not a hand-off. So we built it.
The team that owns payroll is small, deeply experienced, and they have one rule: every release goes through a payroll audit firm before it ships. We slow ourselves down on purpose. There is no agile, no two-week sprint, no "we'll fix it forward". When somebody's pay is at stake, you do not fix it forward.
What's next
Three more countries are in compliance review. Equity comp (RSUs, ISOs, ESPP) is in beta. International contractor payments via local rails — not just SWIFT — ships next quarter. And we're investing in something most payroll vendors won't touch: anomaly detection that flags suspicious pay changes before they go through.
Payroll is unglamorous. It will never be the lead feature on the homepage. But it's the closest thing Tracket has to a moat — because nobody else wants to do this work.
— TRACKET PAYROLL IS PART OF THE PEOPLE SUITE. SEE PEOPLE →