How Vendoo Scaled their Global Team

“[Vendoo] has rapidly grown from 33 to 62 employees in 1.5 years, making Factorial’s automation critical for our small HR team.”

Vendoo is a multi-channel listing platform designed to help online sellers manage their inventory and listings across multiple marketplaces. Founded in 2017 in Maryland, the company has grown into an international business with employees in over 6 countries. Additionally, they doubled their workforce from 33 to 62 employees in just 18 months. Bea Mayer, the HR specialist, faced significant challenges in managing HR tasks using outdated and manual processes, which became unsustainable as the company scaled.

• Vendoo’s challenges
• Factorial’s solutions
• Results

Vendoo’s challenges

“We managed tasks like document management, performance reviews, and tracking employee expenses manually through Google Drive, spreadsheets, and tools like Notion. Our system was overly complicated, making it difficult to stay organized and causing us to waste time.”

Vendoo relied heavily on spreadsheets for almost every critical function, including time tracking, PTO approvals, and expense management. This manual system caused many issues as finding information across multiple spreadsheets was no longer a productive use of their time. Here are the key challenges Bea highlighted.

Key challenges:

• Manual and fragmented HR processes: Workflows like time-off requests were slow, involving multiple steps, back-and-forth communication, and required to make manual updates to the shared calendar to stay up-to-date.
• Prone to errors: Vendoo’s manual processes led to frequent mistakes such as missing PTO requests, incorrect logged hours, and duplicate expenses. Especially as the company scaled, the volume of requests and tasks increased causing mistakes to become more frequent.
• Lack of visibility: Employees couldn’t access their PTO balances, causing Bea to handle frequent inquiries and adding to her workload. This created additional work for Bea and took time away from completing other tasks.  
• Disorganized document storage: Using Google Drive for critical documents made it hard to locate and access important files, wasting time. 
• Inefficient expense tracking: Expense approvals and budgeting were done manually via Google Forms and Excel, creating unnecessary complexity. Bea was in charge of tracking employee budgets, expense requests, and calculating remaining budget balances which became unmanageable as Vendoo’s workforce increased. 
• Performance review difficulties: Vendoo’s previous platform for performance reviews was overly complicated, which caused poor adoption. Vendoo had to spend time with their previous provider configuring OKRs and reviewing templates, ultimately wasting time and money.
• Scalability issues: As Vendoo expanded across multiple countries, tracking PTO, benefits, and payroll became increasingly difficult due to geographical and administrative complexity. It also became difficult to keep track of different time zones and language barriers which exacerbated communication problems.

Factorial’s solutions

“Factorial has been very helpful because not only did we automate everything, but we were also able to customize the functions to determine who has the power to approve or deny requests.”

Factorial was able to solve Vendoo’s challenges and provide them with a solution that eliminates their need for manual work and spreadsheets. Here’s how:

• Automating requests: Factorial reduced Vendoo’s workload and increased PTO  transparency. Employees can now submit requests and their manager is automatically notified to approve or deny their request. In addition, the system automatically updates all calendars, giving all employees full visibility in the shared calendar. This automation eliminates multiple steps from the process. Moreover, employees can see their remaining PTO and benefit balances in real-time.
• Simplified expense management: Factorial’s budgeting feature allowed Vendoo to automate expense approvals and create pre-approved expense categories. This helped reduce Bea’s workload and eliminate unnecessary steps. In addition, Factorial automatically tracks employee spending and tells you the remaining balance in their budget. Overall, this sped up the process and reduced the need for back-and-forth communication between HR and team leaders.
• Streamlined Performance Reviews: Vendoo replaced its complicated performance review software with Factorial, allowing Bea to independently manage and set up performance reviews quickly and efficiently. Factorial’s platform is intuitive and user-friendly, saving time and increasing adoption rate across the team. 
• Global team support: Factorial simplified Vendoo’s global operations by managing time zones, languages, holidays, and currencies. It allowed Vendoo’s growing and international workforce to efficiently schedule and communicate across their international workforce, regardless of the location or language. 
• Enhanced Document Management: Important documents such as contracts, health insurance, and passport copies are stored in a unified solution. This provides greater accessibility and organization compared to Google Drive. 

Results

Factorial’s platform has been instrumental in helping Vendoo scale its HR processes efficiently, reduce manual work, and eliminate errors. As a result of this implementation, both the employee experience and administrative oversight have improved. By adopting Factorial, Vendoo can focus on the growth of their company and people. 

• Efficiency Improvements: Vendoo has automated and streamlined its key processes, saving countless hours each week on administrative tasks like PTO requests and expense tracking.
• Error Reduction: The elimination of manual tracking significantly reduced errors in tasks like PTO tracking and expense reporting. Overall, Factorial improved the accuracy of such documentation and processes, especially as the company grew.
• Employee Empowerment: Employees now had real-time access to their PTO balances, benefits, and performance review information, increasing their sense of ownership and reducing the need for HR involvement in routine inquiries.
• Scalability for Growth: Factorial’s automated workflows scaled effortlessly with Vendoo’s rapid expansion, ensuring that the HR department could manage a growing workforce without being overwhelmed. 

“Factorial works well with different time zones and currencies. Everything I do is automatically set to my time zone so when I schedule meetings and my team members are in a different region, I can see it according to my local time as well as their time zone.”