How Zynchronise Unified Payroll and HR in South Africa with Catalyst
The Partner
Founded as part of the Both& Digital Transformation group, Zynchronise helps businesses unlock operational efficiency by building smart integrations across the Zoho ecosystem without adding infrastructure complexity.
Key Areas of Expertise:
- Serverless application development
- Custom software development
- Cloud computing & scalable architecture
- CRM & Zoho ecosystem consulting
Industry:
Software Development
Solution Category:
HR–Payroll integration & automation
The challenge Structural Friction in Growing Businesses
Across South Africa, many businesses rely on Zoho People for HR and SimplePay for payroll. Individually, both platforms work well, but together, they created hidden operational friction.
For businesses using both systems, everyday payroll operations became a struggle.
Employee data and leave balances had to be manually copied between Zoho People and SimplePay
This repeated data entry took up significant time and increased the chance of errors
Payroll teams spent hours reconciling mismatches instead of focusing on higher-value work
Even small mismatches could lead to delayed salary processing or employee queries
Errors affected employee confidence and trust in payroll processes
Payslips and leave information were spread across different systems
Employees had to switch between platforms, with no single, unified source of truth
As businesses grew, so did the complexity. What worked for a small team quickly became unmanageable,especially without large engineering or DevOps teams. These challenges slowed operations and blocked growth.
The solution Building Zimple with Catalyst
Zynchronise evaluated traditional cloud platforms and custom middleware approaches but found them misaligned with their goal: delivering a production-grade integration without building a DevOps team. Catalyst stood out by combining serverless compute, scheduling, authentication, and document generation in a single platform, allowing the team to focus entirely on business logic.
To eliminate this friction, Zynchronise built Zimple, a seamless integration between Zoho People and SimplePay. Built entirely by a solo developer using Zoho Catalyst, Zimple was designed to do one thing exceptionally well: Make HR and payroll work as one automatically, accurately, and at scale.
Zimple delivers:
- Seamless synchronization of employee and leave data using SimplePay’s API
- Unified payslips that combine:
- Payroll data from SimplePay
- Real-time leave balances from Zoho People
- Automatic payslip storage in each employee’s folder within Zoho People
- A single self-service interface for employees
The entire solution—from infrastructure to business logic—is built and maintained by just one developer. Catalyst eliminated the need to stitch together multiple tools for authentication, hosting, APIs, scheduling, and deployment; everything lived in one platform. It removes systemic friction caused by disconnected platforms and realigns workflows under one scalable, automated logic.
Zimple runs on a carefully designed Catalyst architecture that removes manual effort at every step.
- Automated synchronization: Scheduled jobs poll Zoho People and SimplePay at regular intervals to keep data consistent.
- Payslip generation: PDF payslips are generated automatically using SmartBrowz and enriched with up-to-date HR data.
- Instant availability: Payslips are automatically attached to employee records in Zoho People, creating a seamless employee experience.
- Always-on reliability: Serverless execution ensures the system scales without infrastructure management.
Catalyst made solo development possible by unifying key capabilities:
- AppSail for business logic
- Job Scheduling for regular polling
- SmartBrowz for PDF generation
- OAuth, API Gateway, and DataStore for security and data flow
"Coming from a background where setting up things like authentication, CI/CD, and hosting usually meant juggling multiple tools or even needing extra team members, it was super refreshing to have just one developer manage everything."
Kyle Ferrara, CTO, ZynchroniseBenefits and ROI
Zimple delivered immediate, tangible results:
- Significant reduction in manual payroll reconciliation
- Eliminated duplicate data entry for 100% of payroll cycles
- Single system for employees to access HR and payroll data
- Real-time visibility into leave allocation
- Fewer errors, fewer disputes, and higher confidence
Enabled payroll operations to scale from tens to hundreds of employees without added overheadWhat was once a daily operational burden became a smooth, automated workflow. By eliminating infrastructure overhead, Catalyst enabled Zynchronise to design, deploy, and maintain a mission-critical payroll integration with a single developer, dramatically reducing operational cost while increasing delivery speed.
“Catalyst made it possible for one developer to do what would normally take a full DevOps team.”
Kyle Ferrara, CTO, ZynchroniseThe integration required event-driven triggers for actions like leave submissions and payslip generation, which were not exposed as real-time webhooks..
An early workaround using custom CRON-style logic inside AppSail quickly became complex and unreliable.
After engaging with Catalyst support, access to Job Scheduling (Beta) changed everything:
- Replaced fragile workarounds
- Delivered predictable, structured polling
- Improved stability and long-term maintainability
Sometimes, the biggest breakthroughs come from the right platform support at the right time.
Before vs After: The Zimple Transformation
| Before Zimple | After Zimple |
|---|---|
| Fragmented HR and payroll data spread across systems | Unified HR and payroll data flow across Zoho People and SimplePay |
| Manual syncing of employee records and leave balances | Automatic, scheduled synchronization with no manual intervention |
| Employees navigating multiple platforms for payslips and leave information | One self-service interface for all HR and payroll information |
| Payroll teams spending hours reconciling mismatched data | Payroll teams focused on strategic, value-driven work instead of fixes |
| High risk of errors impacting employee trust | Improved data accuracy, fewer disputes, and higher confidence |
Key Catalyst features used:
Appsail: Serverless container hosting for core business logic
Job Scheduling (CRON Jobs): Reliable, automated synchronization
Data Store (ZCQL): Employee, leave, and payslip data
File Store: Temporary document handling
Cache: High-performance data sharing
SmartBrowz: PDF payslip generation
OAuth-based authentication: Secure, plug-and-play login
API gateway: Centralized API management
Web client hosting, domain mapping, and SSL
DevOps logging tools
“What’s exciting is that Catalyst holds its own against platforms like AWS and Azure when it comes to serverless capabilities, especially in terms of pricing and flexible provisioning. It’s much easier and faster to set up than traditional platforms like AWS, making it ideal for teams who need to launch quickly. If you’re working on a lean team or don’t have infrastructure experts, Catalyst is excellent.”
Kyle Ferrara, CTO, ZynchroniseLooking forward
With Zimple in production, Zynchronise continues to explore deeper automation, cleaner architectures, and more integrations across the Zoho ecosystem.