North Star Payroll is a payroll processing software used to simplify payment and onboarding processes between employers and employees. They offer accounting firms and finance managers intuitive tools, automations and alerts for streamlining transactional processes.
As a payroll processing software, they depend on notifications for inform employers and employees of reports, filings and much more, in order to best ensure things are always kept above board.
We spoke with North Star Payroll's technical project manager, Uzo Okonkwo about North Star Payroll's use of notifications as a payroll processing software and how they use NotificationAPI as a solution to their notification needs.
Tell us about you and NorthStar Payroll
My name is Uzo Okonkwo and I’m the technical project manager at North Star Payroll. I oversee the development and implementation of our payroll management software. I also oversee the overall operations within Northstar payroll. We’ve built software for payroll management. They use our platform to onboard employers & employees. We mainly target accounting firms and bookkeepers.
Why NotificationAPI?
Initially, we wanted to build it completely in-house, and have more control as opposed to utilizing API, but it was a case of scaling. We started with Mailgun. We also tried out TurboSMTP and looked at Twilio for SMS. Within our software, we would like to support different channels like email, SMS, and in-app. In order to build that, it would take a lot of time for our development team.
Once we reviewed the documentation for NotificationAPI, it was a no-brainer. Building from scratch is just a time constraint, along with managing and maintaining logs and infrastructure. The implementation was straightforward. In minutes you can copy the code and implement your own changes, saving a lot of time and developer costs.
Benefits of NotificationAPI?
We have a small developer team, so it’s saved us a couple of months. I’d say we’ve saved 70% of our time spent on designing notifications. The template editor saves us time. We used to design templates on Figma, but we don’t have to do that anymore.
Integration & User Experience
It’s really improved the way notifications are implemented within a system. It’s seamless to implement and integrate, and with the features you offer, NotificationAPI covers any system that needs notifications. Once our developers read your documentation they were pretty much convinced.
I just log in to NotificationAPI and view the logs dashboard to see which notifications were successful, which notifications failed, or which notifications were sent out from staging that weren’t supposed to. I found your logs very beneficial for that.
Closing Thoughts
As we enhance our automated payroll processes, dashboards, and data analytics, we will continue to benefit from NotificationAPI's tools, such as in-app notifications. With our Auto Payroll feature, we are looking forward to NotificationAPI's addition of the scheduling feature.