Portfolio / 01 / Vertical system
Our own product, sold under its own name at paylipayroll.com. Employers in Suriname run their payroll in it today; the rule sets for Aruba, Curaçao and Guyana are built and waiting behind the same screens. Each country has its own tax tables, its own premiums and its own year-end returns. Payli keeps those separate, so the part an employer actually works with stays the same everywhere.
Live in Suriname · paylipayroll.com
Payli is payroll software for employers in the Caribbean who want to run their own payroll, without an accountant in between. It covers the full cycle rather than the calculation alone: employee records, salary components, leave and sick days, hours and overtime, weekly and monthly runs, corrections against periods that are already closed, payslips, bank payment files, and the year-end returns each tax office expects in its own format.
Employees get their own side of it. In the web portal or the Payli Portal app for iPhone and Android they open their payslip, request leave, report sick, photograph a receipt for an expense claim, and clock in and out. Managers approve straight from the notification. Nothing about pay or returns lives in the app; that stays with the employer.
Every employer is a separate client of the system, with its own data, its own users and its own accounts, kept strictly apart from every other. Runs post directly into Zoho Books or Odoo, with an export for SAP, so a company already keeping its books elsewhere does not end up reconciling a second system by hand each month. There is an assistant that answers questions from the employer’s own figures and from our knowledge base of Surinamese payroll law, and an employer can connect its own ChatGPT or Claude to the same data.
It is sold directly, at paylipayroll.com: thirty days free, no card, then from one US dollar per employee per month. Registration to the first approved payslip takes about a quarter of an hour.
The arithmetic is difficult on its own: brackets, ceilings, pro-rata, benefits in kind, pre-tax deductions, back-pay reaching into closed periods. That part at least stays put.
The harder problem is that the rules differ per country and are revised most years, while everything an employer sees has to stay the same. Suriname taxes overtime on a separate table; Guyana folds it into the regular one. Aruba applies a single annual ceiling of AWG 85,000 across two different premiums. Guyana grants a tax-free allowance of one third of monthly gross or G$100,000, whichever is higher, and calculates tax on a bonus by annualising it: work out the year with the bonus, work out the year without, charge the difference.
So a country is never just a switch somewhere in the settings. Each one is maintained separately — its tax tables, its premiums, its general-ledger accounts, its official forms — behind one shared way of working. Adding the fourth country did not mean reopening the parts that were already running, which is what keeps the cost of a fifth one reasonable.
Rates, thresholds and premium ceilings are settings, not software.
The client updates them in the administration screens. When a tax office publishes new figures in January, no release is required. Only a genuinely new rule — a relief that did not exist last year — needs work from us.| Countries | Suriname, Aruba, Curaçao and Guyana, each with its own tax tables, premiums, general-ledger accounts and year-end returns |
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| Payroll cycle | Employee administration, salary components, leave accrual and balances, weekly and monthly runs, and corrections against periods that are already closed |
| Documents | Payslips, bank payment files, and the year-end returns each tax office requires, in the format it requires |
| Accounting | Direct integration with Zoho Books: chart of accounts, journal posting and reversal |
| HR data | Optional synchronisation with Zoho People, with differences reported for review rather than overwritten |
| Access | Separate interfaces for the administrator, the line manager and the employee |
| Security | Two-factor authentication, a complete audit log, and each employer’s data kept strictly separate from every other |
| Privacy | Employee anonymisation, per-employer export, and retention that respects statutory payroll-record obligations |
Before go-live we reviewed the whole system again: twenty rounds of testing, four detailed module reviews and two adversarial reviews of our own changes. Two of the findings are worth setting out.
Several hundred automated tests had been passing for months. The review established that they had only ever been run against a stand-in for the live system, and that the two did not behave the same way.
The consequence would have been serious. Past a certain number of employees the live system returns an incomplete result instead of reporting a problem. A large employer could have been paid in part, with nothing anywhere to show it had happened.
The correction itself was straightforward. The change that mattered was making the stand-in behave like the live system, so the same kind of failure cannot pass a test again.
Every payroll run posts a journal into Zoho Books. A journal that does not balance is rejected, and the month stays open.
Ours came to 16,092.50 against 15,700.00. The difference was exactly the employer's own share of the social premiums: the charges were recorded, but the matching entries had nowhere to go. We corrected the mapping, applied it to all four countries and to employers already set up, and made the internal report and the posted journal share one source, so the two can no longer disagree.
About forty smaller defects came out of the same review: corrections calculated from zero rather than from the previous run, employees excluded from their own final payslip after leaving, a year-end total that counted cancelled runs, allowances that reached the gross figure but never the net, severance charged twice in a December with weekly periods. All were found before anyone was paid.
We include this section because a passing test suite on its own says very little. Finding these took reading the system again on the assumption that something in it was wrong.
| Live | Suriname, at app.paylipayroll.com, since September 2026. Web portal for the employer, Payli Portal app for employees on iPhone and Android. |
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| Built | Aruba, Curaçao and Guyana are complete and tested against each authority’s 2026 schedule; they open as markets one at a time. |
| Distribution | Direct, under its own name: paylipayroll.com. Thirty days free, then a subscription cancelled monthly. Accounting firms can run several employers under one account. |
| Languages | Dutch, English and Spanish in the product; payslips and mail in the language of the employee. |
Payroll is one example of a broader category: systems whose core logic is set externally, published as regulation, and revised on a schedule you do not control. Tariffs, levies, permits, subsidy conditions, compliance returns. If that describes your problem, we have built it four times inside one product, and we run that product ourselves.