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All businesses start with an origin story. For Cephema, the name has roots in Greek mythology — Titans Coeus and Phoebe, deities of human intellect. Coeus represents the inquisitive mind, natural human curiosity and having an analytical mindset. As for Phoebe, she taps into making intelligent predictions about what might come next.
These are both important parts of business, including a technology-centric business like Cephema. This Montreal-based company is a business communications firm with three employees and two contractors. The team is made up of engineers and scientists who understand how to talk tech from a business perspective.
Their clients are also big into technology, and Cephema works with them from the sales and marketing side of things. Their clients span from small to medium-sized businesses and even across borders. With clients from different countries around the world, it lets Cephema bring a global and commercial lens to their technology for all the projects they take on.
Predicting business growth and analyzing potential payroll needs.
When Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Christopher Young started Cephema, he went in with a plan. It wasn’t just about getting his business started, but also predicting how it might grow. That meant anticipating the need for payroll and analyzing the specific payroll needs his business might have down the line. Sounds like some serious channeling of Coeus and Phoebe!
Christopher shares how it unfolded:
Immediately upon starting Cephema, I wanted to put in place all the functions of a normal company, including payroll, so I was ready for growth when it happened. Looking around, incumbent payroll providers are set up to deal with larger established companies. The processes and price points are just okay. I also wanted to work with a Canadian company with a very high-quality product.
— Christopher Young, Chief Executive Officer, Cephema
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Easy-to-use payroll software that gets startups and small businesses.
Christopher’s keen search for a payroll provider and research on payroll software eventually led him to Wagepoint. Some of the initial ways he describes Wagepoint are to say it’s “super responsive” and simple to get the hang of. On top of that, he likes that Wagepoint has an understanding of startups and their specific needs as small businesses.
Wagepoint lets me get set up really easily, with an easy-to-use platform and with a very reasonable cost. And it’s based in Canada with a US operation, in case I expand to the US.
— Christopher Young, Chief Executive Officer, Cephema
The ease of use is a big deal for Christopher, and one of the standout features. This especially comes into play for him when it’s time to run payroll.
It’s just super easy to run payroll. It takes a couple minutes. I also get nice email notifications reminding me it’s time to do payroll, et cetera.
— Christopher Young, Chief Executive Officer, Cephema
Payroll peace of mind.
There are so many different tasks when it comes to handling payroll for a business. Whether it’s the regular pay runs, remittances or even a larger undertaking like year-end filing, Wagepoint and its features make a difference.
Christopher is confident that he can handle the year-end payroll process manually and on his own. However, that doesn’t mean he is opposed to having a little help from his payroll software.
There is peace of mind knowing that I am fulfilling all my regulatory obligations with respect to payroll. For sure, I could manually do it all, and I double-check everything, but having the initial input automatically generated by Wagepoint reduces the effort there probably by 10x and increases my level of comfort that I’ve submitted my year-end returns properly.
— Christopher Young, Chief Executive Officer, Cephema
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Clash of the titans: Manual payroll versus payroll software.
On the topic of manually working on your payroll, Christopher has these words of recommendation for anyone who’s still deciding which titan to side with.
Any manual payroll will be a long process and will be prone to errors. As payroll errors often imply extra banking transactions and, especially, re-submission of regulatory filings, they can be extremely wasteful and costly. Using payroll software vastly reduces this risk.
— Christopher Young, Chief Executive Officer, Cephema
We love to see when planning ahead pans out. It’s so fantastic to hear that Wagepoint cuts down on time and effort for your payroll processing and tasks, Christopher!
👉 See how Wagepoint’s Canadian roots have helped small business Willful conquer payroll tasks.
