Everee: Rebuilding Payroll From the Ground Up, One Paycheck at a Time

The Problem: A Decades-Old System Built on an Outdated Assumption

In 2018, a few of Everee's founders found themselves having a very ordinary conversation as parents: their kids were entering the workforce, often in their first jobs at small restaurants and food service locations, and something didn't add up. These teenagers would onboard, start showing up for shifts, and then wait two, three, sometimes four weeks before seeing a single paycheck.

"It seemed kind of wild that this is the experience that's happening at this point," says Piers, Co-Founder and CIO at Everee. "It sets a really wild expectation when you first enter the workforce. You go, oh, this is not working in my favor as an employee."

That observation led the founding team to look harder at the payroll industry itself, and what they found was a system built on legacy software and processes that hadn't meaningfully changed in decades. "What we uncovered was an industry full of legacy software and ancient processes, really kind of a dinosaur industry," Piers explains. "We saw that there was a huge opportunity to disrupt and to do something really, really different."

The Solution: Payroll Without the Pay Cycle

Everee became one of the first payroll platforms to offer daily pay, but the company's thinking on what that actually meant has evolved significantly since 2018. "Originally, pre-COVID, what we were thinking about daily pay was that it would ultimately become essentially a de facto standard in frontline industries," Piers says. The pandemic accelerated that shift, and what Everee learned in the years since is that the real value isn't just paying people faster, it's giving employers the workflows and infrastructure to actually deliver on that promise reliably.

That distinction matters because of how Everee's approach differs from earned wage access (EWA), a category it's often confused with. "The fundamental problem that earned wage access is solving is a really important one," Piers says. "We just disagree with the way that the EWA industry offers that product." Rather than routing early pay through a third-party, consumer-lending-style provider, Everee built early pay as a native, fully integrated feature of its own payroll system, the only payroll provider to do so. "We think there's a better way. We think it should be done in payroll so that there are no compliance challenges, so everything is reported consistently and cleanly and centralized."

That same philosophy extends to Flex Credit, Everee's solution for staffing agencies and other companies with AR gaps. Staffing agencies, for instance, typically rely on factoring companies to bridge the gap between net-30 client invoices and same-day or weekly worker pay. Factoring arrangements sit outside the payroll system entirely and take a cut of already thin margins.

Everee's Chief Commercial Officer Dana Gagnon explains the alternative: "Our payroll funding sits in our system, and Flex Credit is our ability, on our own credit line, to front payroll for our clients while there is this AR gap. The faster they pay us back, the less it costs." Because it's built natively into the same platform clients already use to run payroll, there's no additional money movement, no third-party vendor, and no added complexity. Credit fees are also applied to payroll dollars only, preserving the agency markup entirely.

Built for the Full Spectrum of the American Workforce

Everee serves an unusually wide range of worker types, W-2 and 1099, salaried and shift-based, gig drivers and mortgage loan officers, and that range demands serious underlying complexity. According to Piers, building the software itself has become progressively less of a differentiator in the AI era. "Implementation is cheap, as they say now," he notes. What has become more valuable, not less, is deep domain expertise: "Expertise and deep knowledge and understanding of compliance concerns, and really being embedded in the areas of the economy where our customers are... It takes years, and that's something that we now have quite a bit of."

Recognition: Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies

That expertise, paired with genuine product innovation, earned Everee a spot on Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list, a notoriously difficult recognition to win. The application centered on a capability unique to Everee in the payroll industry: the ability to run payroll with no pay cycle at all.

"We're the only payroll company where you can run payroll without a pay cycle at all," says Gagnon, who authored the application. "It really enables all of the other things that our platform does. You can pay workers faster, you have real-time funding of payroll, and all the compliance backbone that needs to support that real-time payroll is there."

The real-world impact of that capability shows up in how clients use it. One of Everee's large staffing clients in the light industrial and hospitality space uses pay-cycle-free payment as an employee incentive, reserving it for their most reliable, highest-performing workers. Rather than waiting a full week or longer for a paycheck, those employees are paid the next morning for a shift completed the day before. "That original vision that I talked about earlier, that we had back in 2018," Piers reflects, "is something that's coming to fruition."

Why Payment Speed Has Become Non-Negotiable

Everee has cited data showing that 61% of clinicians would choose one staffing agency over another based on same-day pay availability, and 84% of gig drivers say payment speed matters most to them. Gagnon connects that data to a broader structural mismatch in how American workers are paid. "There is just a mismatch," she says. "Bills are more expensive... there's no rule where your bills match your payday cycle. Rent is due on the first, even if you don't get paid until a week later."

She points to a telling statistic from the earned wage access industry: the average consumer using an EWA app draws nearly 33 times a year. "The work is done, the earnings are there, and yet the onus is on a worker to request their earnings 33 times a year." For employers, closing that gap isn't just about doing right by workers, it's a competitive advantage. "A happy workforce is what every employer wants, and this does go a long way to showing them that they value their financial well-being."

Real Companies, Real Impact

Everee's team still regularly works face-to-face with clients, a practice that dates back to the company's earliest days. Piers recalls one of the formative moments from Everee's first few years: visiting the office of a Salt Lake City-based trucking, transportation, and delivery company that had been in business for 35 to 40 years. "The owners of that company had never had any kind of personal attention from a payroll vendor before," he says. "Here they are with real people in their office explaining and helping their employees understand how to think about their pay... That was a bright spot in the first few years that I'll never forget."

Gagnon highlights dlivrd, one of Everee's longest-standing clients, as emblematic of that growth story. A relationship dating back several years, dlivrd has grown from operating in roughly a dozen states to all 50 states plus Canada and Mexico, expanding from delivery into on-demand staffing and virtual assistant programs along the way. The company also became the first client to launch Everee's branded Visa pay card, featuring its own distinctive green branding. "Every time they swipe that card to buy groceries, they are remembering their employer," Gagnon says. dlivrd uses Everee's real-time payouts (drivers are paid the moment a delivery is completed) alongside the Flex Credit facility that has helped fund its growth.

Everee's infrastructure product, which allows platforms to embed payroll directly into their own software, has become a particularly rich source of customer stories. "Usually it goes one of two ways," Gagnon explains. "They've either tried to build payroll themselves, and they're like, ‘oh wow, this is impossible’... or they've gone with some other providers that are 100% API, they don't actually do direct payroll themselves... and it's still a really massive undertaking." Everee's pitch in those conversations is simple: "We've lived this, so you don't have to. We'll do it for you."

The Branded Pay Card: Making Employers the Hero

Everee's custom-branded pay card program, which lets companies issue their own fully branded Visa-powered pay card, grew directly out of the company's broader philosophy. "Our goal is to make sure that our clients, the employers, are really the hero," Piers says. When a branded card is loaded with pay in real time and used for everyday purchases like gas and groceries, "it really helps our employer, our customer, feel more like a present and positive part of their lives." The branded card, he says, is "a nice little cherry on top" of the broader real-time pay experience.

The Infrastructure Bet: Payroll as a First-Class Citizen

Everee's next phase centers on evolving its embeddable, API-first infrastructure that other platforms can build directly into their own products. Piers frames this as a direct response to the shift toward AI-native software development. "Payroll has kind of hidden in a dark corner in the back office," he says, even as the software layers around it, workforce scheduling, labor tracking, and job placement, have grown increasingly sophisticated within specific industries like healthcare staffing and transportation.

"What we see as a huge opportunity for us, with the way that we're positioned as experts in integrated and embedded payroll, is to essentially offer all of our expertise, our capability, and our software platform as a component that can be easily integrated and built into those industry-specific software platforms," Piers explains. "Payroll no longer needs to be stuck in that dark corner. It can instead be a first-class citizen of the software stack."

Why Everee Chose SoFi Tech Solutions

When Everee evaluated infrastructure partners, Galileo (now SoFi Tech Solutions) stood out initially for a practical reason: proximity. Both companies are based in the Salt Lake City area. But proximity isn't what sealed the decision.

"The reason that we chose to move forward with Galileo, now SoFi Tech, is because of the people," Piers says. "We received such fantastic support in designing our program, in customizing it to exactly our needs, which were unusual... We kind of pushed the team to figure out some creative solutions for exactly our program, and everything came together exactly the way that we wanted it to in that sort of collaborative process." Piers is direct about what made the difference: "It was really a people's decision at the end of the day."

What's Next

Over the next six months, Everee is rolling out additional AI-native payroll infrastructure designed specifically for software partners who want to integrate payroll as a core part of their own platforms, already in development with several design partners. On the direct-client side, Gagnon points to new AI-enabled workflows and anomaly detection launching in the coming weeks, along with a major focus on simplifying payroll onboarding itself. "People don't like to switch payroll, because it's been a project historically, and we don't believe it needs to be anymore in the age of AI," she says.

Asked where Everee sees itself in five years, Piers doesn't hesitate: the default payroll infrastructure for non-traditional workforces, whether served directly or through software partnerships. "Our value, our product offerings, the problems that we're solving are going to be more expansive five years from now than today," he says. "We would see ourselves as the default, as the best choice for those types of employers for payroll."

The Takeaway

Asked what he wants every business owner paying hourly, gig, or shift-based workers to understand about payroll today, Piers offers a simple reframe: "Payroll does not need to be as old and scary and broken as it has traditionally been seen in the industry... There is such an opportunity, through better partnerships, better technology, better tools overall, to bring payroll into the light and transform it from being a risk center to being an opportunity center in your business."

Gagnon adds a second half to that thought: speed matters everywhere in payroll, not just in how workers are paid. "I talk to clients who say they have to submit a ticket every time they want to run a report, and then wait two days to get a PDF emailed to them. That is just crazy. We've torn down these legacy processes one by one, and we're going to keep doing it."