Summary
Xero is the accounting platform for small businesses, trusted by 4.6 million customers worldwide. Based in New Zealand, the company has a global presence with offices in the US, Australia, South Africa, and more.
As the compensation team at Xero worked to refine their equity and incentive programs, they realized their existing compensation processes weren’t cutting it. Workday was effective as an overall HCM platform, but compensation configuration required significant support from technical experts to adjust, making it difficult for the compensation team to move at the speed of the business. Meanwhile, spreadsheets were time-consuming to manage, error-prone, insecure, and lacked visibility.
By implementing Compensation Planning from Pave, Xero’s compensation team regained control and created a faster, more adaptable salary review process that supports the nuances of their global business—and builds confidence and credibility across the organization.
Key Wins
- Improved confidence in global pay decisions to better attract and retain top talent
- Delivered annual salary review updates in minutes vs. months
- Virtually eliminated the need to route compensation changes through Workday specialists during annual salary reviews
- Built an adaptable compensation planning process that supports real-time changes
- Set custom compensation parameters for employees in different regions
- Provided a future-proof foundation, ensuring that regardless of how requirements evolve, the platform possesses the scalability to accommodate our shifting needs.
The Challenge: Disconnected Systems and Processes
The compensation team at Xero faced a familiar challenge: compensation reviews were spread across multiple systems and spreadsheets, resulting in a manual, time-consuming process that did not drive consistent or effective compensation decisions across the company.
Along with his team, Ben Squires, Principal Reward Consultant at Xero, was using Workday to run the annual salary review (ASR), and spreadsheets for the interim salary review (ISR). These processes had never been ideal, but as the company adjusted equity and incentive structures, the challenges became too hard to ignore.
When the team needed to update short-term incentive and long-term equity percentages for senior leaders, the changes required routing through internal Workday specialists—a process that couldn’t be stood up quickly enough to meet the company’s timeline. The team turned to spreadsheets.
“We weren’t sure Workday had the functionality and flexibility to begin with, but it certainly wasn’t something we could stand up between March and the start of the annual salary review in June.”
—Ben Squires, Principal Reward Consultant at Xero
After receiving equity and incentive updates, senior leaders had questions. Many saw a disconnect between the changes they received and where they thought their total compensation package would land. To provide further visibility, Ben and his team built another spreadsheet, this time showing realizable pay, equity information, and cash compensation.
The Xero team needed a better way—one that put the comp team in direct control, without needing to depend on specialists each time requirements shifted.
The Solution: Implementing a Platform Built for Compensation
Ben and the Xero team planned to implement Pave in three phases, starting with senior leaders and employees on short-term incentive programs.
The initial rollout was so successful and built such credibility with senior leaders that the team decided to forgo the third phase and bring Pave to the entire organization faster than expected.
“We had such a great experience with [the initial rollout of] Pave, we made the decision to move everything to Pave.”
—Ben Squires, Principal Reward Consultant at Xero
“Implementing Pave was a really positive experience,” shared Ben. The process was seamless, and enabled Ben to make technical changes on his own—without needing to route requests through Workday specialists—to support the rapidly changing and global nature of the business.
The Change: Control, Confidence, and Credibility
In Workday, setting up compensation workflows used to require support from a team of internal experts. Those days are over at Xero.
With Compensation Planning from Pave, Ben is in the driver’s seat. Because Pave sits on top of Workday as the system of record, the compensation team can iterate on planning logic directly without needing to sequence every upstream input first. Tasks that used to require weeks of cross-functional coordination can now be handled by Ben alone, and features like Smart Flags enable him to easily identify any issues that need to be addressed.
Even better, the Workday team inside Xero is also happy—the equivalent of two full-time employees of peak capacity during the annual salary review process is now freed up to focus on other priorities. Managers also have a clearer understanding of compensation in their teams, making it easy to quickly assess current compensation packages and plan for the future.
Ben and team are operating like never before because of the flexibility and control Pave provides. “Our thinking regarding solutions shifts quite a lot, and often late in the process,” shared Ben. Making changes to equity, cash, and vesting profiles used to be rigid and difficult to do. Now, it’s easy to make updates on the fly, which makes the team look good and work more effectively.
“Changes would take a lot longer with Workday. We’d have to secure support from the internal Workday team and make sure it was feasible. It was a slow process. With Pave, it’s much more nimble.”
—Ben Squires, Principal Reward Consultant at Xero
Last year, as the Xero compensation team was approaching the annual salary review go-live date, they decided they wanted to implement a range of equity targets that differed from their original plan. “We were able to make it happen with Pave. We definitely would not have been able to make that happen on Workday.”
Adapting to Global Needs
The Xero compensation team went into a recent interim salary review thinking it would be a straightforward process.
Their plan was to identify who was below the band and then bring them up to the minimum, or provide at least a 2% increase. If there was money left over, the team planned to target employees in high-demand areas. They implemented a 20% cap on increases as a hard stop.
During the process, Ben realized they needed to give team members in South Africa more than 20% to provide a meaningful pay increase. With Pave, Ben was able to update the rules for this market in minutes, moving from a hard stop to a soft stop.
“It’s great to be able to create your own rules,” shared Ben. “Pave is so intuitive, particularly on the admin side of things.”
Today, Ben and the team rely on Pave to manage compensation decisions across a global organization. They’re able to take control, make decisions with confidence, and build new levels of credibility with stakeholders.
Looking Ahead
The Xero team has more projects on the roadmap.
Ben wants to help employees on commission visualize their on-target earnings, and rethink the organization’s approach to equity plan design. These projects are a top priority for the company—because in a competitive talent market, the quality of your compensation programs is often what tips the balance on keeping your best people.
As Ben continues to refine Xero’s compensation program, he’s confident Pave is the right partner. “The constant product iteration has been great.”
