ZenPayroll now lets companies match employees’ charitable donations

ZenPayroll, a San Francisco startup with cloud-based software for payroll processing for small companies, is doing more than merely enabling companies to allow employees to allocate a portion of their paychecks to charities. The startup has begun helping employers to match those donations.

“It’s a way for the employer to say, I want to support you, my employee, in the things you care about,” Josh Reeves, chief executive and cofounder of ZenPayroll, told VentureBeat in an interview. “I want to give you more financial resources to give to the causes that you believe in.”

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ZenPayroll had always planned to implement the feature, and indeed it’s been almost a year since the startup introduced the Giving option that allows employees to make donations from their paychecks. Now ZenPayroll can more confidently declare that it supports what Reeves calls “the human side of payroll.”

Once employees give the green light to make a donation to any of several thousand charities and decide how much they want to give and how, the company administrator can turn on matching and set a limit on how much the company will donate for each employee per year.

Reeves clearly believes in the importance of donating to nonprofits. He helped start a nonprofit while in college at Stanford University and still serves as an advisor, he said. So he knows about the importance of cash flow for such organizations.

“Nonprofits love recurring donations,” he said.

ZenPayroll works in 31 states in the U.S., and it will be up and running in all 50 states in the first quarter of next year, Reeves said. The startup announced a $20 million round in February. Competitors include ADP, Intuit, and Paychex.