Paychex Buys Stake in Kashoo

Paychex has purchased a minority stake in and formed a strategic alliance with cloud accounting software provider Kashoo.

As part of the partnership, Paychex senior vice president of information technology, product management and development, Michael E. Gioja, and vice president of marketing Andy Childs will join the Kashoo board of directors.

The deal also represents the first partnership with a U.S.-based payroll company for Kashoo, which up until now has only integrated with Canadian payroll services.

Paychex president and chief executive Martin Mucci explained that Paychex’s strategic decision to make an equity investment in Kashoo reflects his company’s expansion of products and services Paychex provides to its small and midsized clients and the accounting community.

“We are very excited to be investing in and partnering with Kashoo, one of the leading small business accounting applications in the marketplace,” said Mucci. “Paychex has a history of great partnership with the CPA community, and now offering our clients and CPAs a simple to use and effective cloud accounting solution that will be integrated with the leader in payroll and human resource offerings will be very powerful.”

For Kashoo CEO Jim Secord, the move also allows his company to further expand its offerings to small business owners, specifically by ultimately integrating Paychex directly into his company’s product.

“We knew that we had a gap in our product in not having U.S. payroll, in fact the number one requested feature for users in the U.S. was how to incorporate payroll,” said Secord. “We had discussions over a year ago with Paychex and SurePayroll to talk about how we can better integrate, those discussions led to the idea that maybe we can simplify the process more by integrating it right into Kashoo rather have it more arm’s length. They are a trusted brand among small businesses and we’re looking forward to leveraging that as well.”

Secord also noted that specifics on how the products will integrate will be revealed in the coming weeks.

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Technology M&A Payroll
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