Overview: Aepoch is a BPO who works on payroll in China. Initially they began looking at implementing with Tofu earlier in 2023. In August ‘23 they informed us that they have had high turnover with many colleagues leaving and they need to put any change and implementation on hold. Sarina seems to be the most hands on, testing the platform and asking operational questions. The team has a lot of proactive self starters, that prefer to test and try things on their own, have meetings with pre-shared questions. They seem to be very operationally driven and looking for Tofu to take off some of the administrative burdens that they currently have. They are big fans of the AI features.
Main POC’s:
- Melissa Yang (Aepoch Advisors)
melissa.yang@aepochadvisors.com
- Sarina Shi (Aepoch Advisors)
sarina.shi@aepochadvisors.com
- chennidy.duan@aepochadvisors.com
- lizzie.cheng@aepochadvisors.com
Notion Page: https://www.notion.so/spinachhr/Aepoch-8bddb7f170fc41b5a13be06d4f906e7f
Staging Environment Link: https://aepoch.staging.spinachhr.com/
Current Status based on last meeting:
Meeting with Melissa, Sarina, 1 more person Aepoch Advisors Nov 29th.Tofu: Tal, Saman, NatalieOverall Feedback: The team was really happy with the changes they have seen on the platform. They were able to navigate it through the use of guides that were provided as well as just from what they have seen in demos previously.They particularly liked the AI capabilities. Melissa mentioned that the email writing feature, summarizing the payroll report is a game changer, and will be saving them a lot of time and resources.We reviewed the responses to their questions that were previously shared below a few of their main needs and takeaways:
- They will need to set up different groups in order to provide their payroll processors with visibility to only their clients. How to do this was reviewed on the call and Sarina will be testing it on her own.
- They had a few unique edge cases of additional payroll run needs (once for sales commission sales, and once for 2 pay dates within the month for one employee only). It was discussed and decided that they would add an additional pay run within the settings of their recurrent payrun settings
- There were two items that seemed to have bugs and Natalie will open tickets:
- The CSV seems to not show Chinese characters correctly when downloading the report
- They had an error when they uploaded a attachment to a payroll instruction
- We need to provide a better guidance on the payroll report statuses. These seemed to be confusing and unclear. Natalie will work on improving this in the guides
- Aepoch was worried about being able to mark a payroll report as complete with variances still showing. They were going to discuss internal procedures, to make sure that checks and balances are done accordingly and avoid any confusion that may result from this.
Next Steps: The team seems ready to begin onboarding. They said they want to do so with new clients, and informed us there are a number of them in their pipeline. Currently we are looking at small head country (10-12 employees). Right now the plan is to start with one client who will have a go live date of January. The team wanted to have a week to discuss internally to select the best client, as well as a few other operational items they wanted to sort through amongst themselves. We also informed them that they have a clean new tenant where we will be running the live payroll once they are ready. Natalie to follow up with them by Wednesday (US time) next week.
Call recording link is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dOIJWQM81nmfFWg5OJWC7vm2T0jlncEL/view (call from beginning of November)
Next Steps:
The Aepoch team is going to discuss some operational matters over the week. Natalie to reach out first week of December to start putting a timeline and begin implementation processes.