Designing for payroll was a rare opportunity to disrupt change in an industry that has remained stagnant for decades.
Meet Pento, an automated payroll solution that aspires to streamline payroll for businesses by helping to automate payments, monthly tasks, and legal requirements. Essentially, an all-in-all platform to empower businesses to own their payroll with no arbitrary deadlines or fees.
A pay run in draft, with a single employee's pay opened up line by line.
Context & Challenge
The industry standard is to outsource payroll, but we aimed to create a platform that grows with your business as a trusted partner, ensuring compliance and freeing your time.
Typically, an in-house payroll team coordinates with the outsourced company, but deadlines require change weeks ahead, delaying updates and causing frustration.
As a start-up, Pento needed rapid growth but also caution since payroll impacts people’s livelihoods. This demanded careful MVP planning to test ideas while ensuring reliable financial timelines and zero downtime.
Strategy
Companies often start with one person, usually the CEO, managing HR and payroll. As they grow, they hire specialists.
We aimed for Pento to be a platform that grows with your business, acting as a trusted advisor to keep you compliant and save time. Early users were payroll teams, so we designed with their expertise in mind, gradually reducing their workload while valuing their judgment and experience.
Approach
From the start, core design principles guided Pento’s design, ensuring we stayed on mission. I focused on expanding payroll coverage, helping companies embrace Pento regardless of employment type.
I designed intuitive interfaces simplifying intricate legislation to educate and accelerate customers, making them Pento experts, not payroll experts.
It has always been clear that Ollie gives his full effort in anything he’s involved in, and if there’s nothing to tackle, he will find ways to help others, improve systems or explore opportunities with deep data dives.
Making decisions
A big priority was how we asked questions. We had to make explicit decisions about what we would automate and what questions would require a precise response.
Making sure that default values were only presented when the risk was low. Paired with good validation and explanations, we could help educate and inform our users as they progressed.
Highlights
Some of the notable projects I took the lead on.
Reporting P11D benefits
All benefits are reportable, and historically this is done through a yearly P11D report. Sent to the UK government, it helps them calculate tax liability after reviewing employee perks.
We had to create a system that helped companies enter the benefits they offered and categorise them correctly.
Company cars
All benefits are taxed, meaning every benefit needs a value. For company cars, this is calculated based on the vehicle specifications, notably it’s emissions.
HMRC provide a long list of questions to help calculate what an employee owes on their car, and it was my job to help ensure all the correct information was captured correctly and smoothing the process where possible.
Pension compliance
Ensuring that companies remained compliant with the pension regulators rules turned out to be one of the most complex projects I’d worked on. It quickly became apparent that “is this employee required to be in our pension scheme?” was, to say the least, a loaded question.
Numerous factors affected a person’s eligibility, including a specific date the company became regulated, the date of birth and gender of the employee, their earnings, and more.
All of this information had to be carefully baked into account to guarantee the company was compliant with UK law. Mistakes would result in large fines and headaches for employees.
Reflection
Payroll turned out to be one of the most rewarding problem spaces I have worked in. High stakes, unforgiving edge cases, and a genuine appetite for change from the people doing the work.
The hardest lesson was learning when not to automate. Every question we removed saved someone time, but the wrong default could cost a company a fine or an employee their correct pay. Restraint became a design principle. We automated what was safe and asked plainly when it wasn’t.
Designing for experts changed how I work. Payroll teams knew more than we did, and the goal was never to replace their judgment but to carry the load around it. That framing, build for the specialist, reduce busywork, and keep the decisions theirs, shaped every design.
I also grew comfortable sitting with complexity. Pension eligibility alone held more conditions than any feature I’d touched, and the only way through was to understand it fully before simplifying it. You cannot make something clear until you understand it completely.
Pento taught me that trust is designed, not claimed. In a space where mistakes hurt real people, clarity, validation, and honesty about risk were the features that mattered most.