Once upon a time, there was a young man. He was on a trek to the Western Ghats where he tried a fruity, delicious jackfruit bar made by the locals at a chai ki tapri. The man we’re talking about is Go Desi’s Founder, Vinay Kothari, who was left with an irresistible taste and startup idea.
So this is what he did–he, along with his sister and family, managed to get those locally made fruity bars and set up a booth in Bangalore’s flea market. They got enough candy bars to last for 3 days. But guess what? All the candy bars sold out on Day 1, the first half itself.
Go Desi’s Vision
What makes Go Desi unique is they are selling products that remind consumers of their childhood days. They want to make the ‘Desi’ food popular enough that it’s available in every corner of India and one day, even beyond our borders!
“People don’t pick up products like Imli bars, sun-dried lemon snacks, or sweet amla candies until they know how they’re made, what kind of ingredients are used, and who made them. We also wanted to create a brand experience when people ate the local products and provide an experience of the highest quality standards.” –Raksha Kothari, Co-founder of Go Desi.
For the first few months, when Go Desi was in the making, Raksha Kothari and Vinay Kothari had a great support system in the form of their family, as they all would set up booths at flea markets. And their parents even took care of their accounts.
As Go Desi became a hit and scaled, they onboarded more employees. They grew from a team of 20 to 200+ employees, which also included contractors. When this happened, Vinay and Raksha started facing the below challenges.
Challenges
1. Delayed Payslips & Salaries
Prior to RazorpayX Payroll, Vinay and Raksha outsourced their payroll to a third party for salary calculations and payments. This payroll outsourcing agency would share employee payslips a month after making payments. What is worse is that sometimes even the salaries of employees would get delayed due to manual calculations and internal checks after receiving calculation sheets from the agency.
2. Inefficient and Error-Prone Payroll Process
As Go Desi scaled, Vinay and Raksha found that doing accurate TDS calculations and PF deductions on time became more complex. While manual calculations were easy when they were a team of 20, this changed drastically when they crossed 200+ employees. Managing information in one place and calculating TDS & PF for each employee became inefficient and error-prone.
3. Payment of Contractors
Along with full-time employees, Go Desi also employs contractual employees. Paying contractors after deducting the right taxes is an arduous process. Furthermore, since sales also relied on offline methods, Go Desi Founders couldn’t track their sales executives’ timesheets to calculate their attendance & salaries accurately.
All in all, the entire payroll process was extremely inefficient and arduous, with no guarantee of accuracy at the end of it.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Go Desi started looking for fully automated payroll software, which could take care of both its payroll process AND tax compliances. Vinay had heard about RazorpayX Payroll in his founder community.
After getting the product demo, Vinay was confident that RazorpayX Payroll was the right solution for them. In fact, they got onboarded within 4 days.
“Since implementing RazorpayX Payroll, we have been able to automate 90% of our manual tasks related to salary disbursals and tax payment and filing at scale. This has not only saved us time and resources but also given us peace of mind knowing that everything is accurate and compliant.” – Vinay Kothari, Founder of Go Desi.
Results
The finance & HR team of Go Desi no longer had to bear the burden of outsourcing payroll to an external agency or manual tax filings such as PF, PT, TDS & ESIC; as a result, the management saved more than 500+ hours annually on payroll. This enabled Go Desi to ensure timely payment to all employees, including contractors and elevate their employee
experience.
