How Formsort streamlined payments and gained a recruiting advantage using Plane
With Plane, Formsort automated payments and successfully recruited a critical hire.
Founded in 2019, Formsort is reinventing how online businesses build and optimize forms, enabling growth teams to easily create forms without using engineering resources. The company is fully distributed, with team members in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. In 2020, they began looking for a more robust way to pay contractors in Europe. They had initially used a money transfer service, but wanted to find a solution that took care of both hiring and payments. Benjamin Fine, co-founder and CFO at Formsort, says, “I wanted to invest in the best way to structure hiring contractors, and I chose Plane.”
The Formsort team uses Plane’s SOC 2 compliant platform to securely store sensitive data related to hiring, such as personnel details, and to send confidential information, like contracts. Formsort’s COO Cansu Aydede says, “We use Plane to send confidentiality agreements to our employees and to get bank information. Streamlining that process has been really helpful for us.” Plane’s tax compliance services have also helped Formsort save time. “Being able to store our agreements, having Plane complete basic tax document collection for us from our foreign employees, and then automatically paying people, has been hugely impactful,” says Benjamin.
With Plane, Formsort has found a way to eliminate manual work through automated payments. “Automatically paying people on a subscription basis is a huge benefit, versus manually queuing up every pay period,” says Benjamin. “The recurring payment and one-time payment features are the ones that we leverage the most heavily.” He appreciates that, once he sets up automated payments, he doesn’t have to think about them anymore. “From an operational perspective, it’s very much set it and forget it, which is nice. I don’t need to look at Plane. I just want our team to get paid. As long as they’re getting paid, that’s great. Everything’s working.”
Plane’s optimal exchange rates and lack of transaction fees have also been a great benefit for Formsort’s contractors. Benjamin says, “That just feels messed up [if contractors get paid less due to markups and fees.] We want to make sure they get paid as much of that dollar as possible, and it’s a positive that you’re only charging us at Formsort instead of our contractors.”
In terms of recruiting and hiring international candidates, Formsort has gained an advantage through Plane’s employer of record services. With Plane’s assistance, Formsort was able to successfully hire a candidate whom they’d been recruiting for six months. Benjamin says, “Plane helped us close a candidate by figuring out a path forward for getting somebody to be able to immigrate to the UK. We closed a very senior hire, because Plane helped us figure out that we could get them over there and use Plane’s EOR services. That was an option, even though our company is a small company. Those sorts of hires make a big difference for early teams. That was extremely valuable to us.”
Their team appreciated Plane’s personal touch through the entire immigration process for their new hire. Cansu says, “Jacob [Customer Success Manager at Plane] made it feel less like we were working with just a product and added a human element to it. He really took care of us and worked it out for us.”
In addition to being responsive and friendly, Plane's expert team gave invaluable help with intricate immigration questions from both Formsort and their new hire. Benjamin says, “We got individual help and care from Plane about how to deal with immigration and navigating complex issues like that. When you’re trying to hire somebody, and they have a residency question or tax question, and you can solve those things through Plane, that makes a big difference.”
As Formsort continues to grow their team, they can count on Plane to assist with hiring and paying their new team members, wherever they may reside.
