How Agora Leverages Payroll API Integrations with Merge
We’re so excited to share more about how we work with Agora, a leading total compensation platform, to provide HR and payroll API integrations through Merge’s Unified API.
About Agora
Miles Hobby and Geoffrey Tisserand had been software engineers at several high-growth startups, including Flexport, Uber, Instacart and Checkr. After several years at and interviewing with Silicon Valley startups, they were tired of receiving equity-based compensation with little information or guidance. Both believed that companies and HR departments needed a better way to structure, manage, and communicate their compensation plans. Employees also needed more visibility into what their equity offers meant, and what their total compensation was.
With a strong belief in better pay transparency, Agora was born.
We first met with the Agora team in April, and it’s been incredible seeing the company’s growth over the past year. In May, Agora raised $7.5M in seed funding led by CRV, and their team and customer base is growing extremely quickly.
Agora helps companies on all aspects of compensation, with features including
- Dynamic, interactive offer letters
- Employee-facing total rewards portals
- Compensation band management
- Compensation and people analytics
The Problem:
Agora is the compensation layer of the HR stack. It sits in the middle of the HRIS, Cap Table, and ATS. The goal for Agora is to provide the compensation structure for the company, allowing them to set their internal pay ranges, understand how their employees fit into those ranges to identify inequities, and explain compensation to their employees and candidates.
While Agora is the system of record for compensation structure, the HRIS is still the source of truth for employee data — and their platform needs access to that data to help companies make compensation decisions and employees visualize their compensation.
Agora considered building out and maintaining every integration one by one for their customers — but this would have taken time and resources that just weren’t available as a seed-stage startup.
The Solution:
Because Agora’s product has in-depth visualizations to show and view employee compensation (as shown below), there are several ways in which Agora uses Merge’s HRIS API in their product.
The User Experience
When an Agora customer first logs in, Agora’s integrations page shows 25+ HR and payroll API integrations. Click a logo, and that Agora customer is met with Merge Link — our integration authentication component. Merge Link’s detailed instructions walk the user through entering their credentials and authorizing their specific integration, such as with UKG or BambooHR. Once the required credentials are validated, Agora is able to pull and post normalized HRIS data from and to whatever platform their customers are using.
“Merge has truly felt like an extension of our team. Rather than spending the time and money to build and support 25+ HRIS integrations, we seamlessly connect to a single API that handles everything for us. Any time we have a request or issue, they help us quickly — often within minutes. With Merge, we can easily bring employment data into Agora to help simplify and demystify compensation for companies.” — Miles Hobby, Cofounder
Accessing Compensation Data Simply with Merge’s Payroll API Integration
Merge’s data finds its way to Agora in two critical ways. Hitting /employees and /employments on Merge’s Unified API, Agora can show its users:
Admin view of current and historical employment salaries of all employees
- This data allows companies to view and filter compensation ranges for their entire org. HR Admins can filter by geography, gender, ethnicity, and more with just a few clicks. This data also allows companies to easily review who is above or below bands, and who is about to finish vesting all of their equity.
Individual Employee view of current compensation
- Agora’s new employee-facing total rewards portal allows employees to review their current salary over time. This dashboard is extremely dynamic, and allows employees to understand the full picture of their compensation, including benefits, bonuses, and equity. Employees can model how their compensation could evolve and see what their estimated equity value is as the company continues to grow.
Watching more logos onboard onto the Agora platform every week has been such an incredible experience. We’re so excited to be working with the Agora team, and take the integrations problem off of their hands!
