Paycom:SaaS in the cloud

Paycom Software Inc (Payc)

Company:

Payc is a SaaS (Software as a Service) business model. They sell a suite of tools for companies to manage their payroll and Human resources. They are a cloud based service that allows all of the tools to be accessed through a single web page. The company IPO’d in April of 2014 and has a Market Cap today of 2.07 Billion. Their suite of tools allows businesses to manage the complete employment life cycle, from recruitment, to retirement. This is a full-service functionality, including data analytics that lowers labor costs, drives employee engagement and reduces exposure.

Management:

Chad Richison - President, CEO
Chad Richison has a Glass door 88% approval. Payc is rated 4 stars for the company. The CEO Left ADP and became the CEO and Founder of Paycom in 1998. He was a salesman for ADP. Mr, Richison owned 12,646,329 shares of the company , coming out to 22% of the company shares since the start of the year. You can find this information on the SEC site, form DEF14A. He recently sold 1,500,000 shares.

Craig Boelte – CFO
Mr. Craig E. Boelte has been the Chief Financial Officer at Paycom Software, Inc. since February 2006. Prior to joining Paycom, Mr. Boelte owned an accounting practice serving over 600 clients including Paycom. Prior to that, he spent nine years at Deloitte & Touche where he served as Senior Tax Manager.
Mr. Boelte owns 551,769 shares of the company, less than 1%.

Products:

Payc started out as a web based payroll company. Eventually they have migrated to a company that supplies many products to help teach, and access information for each employee. It is a tool now to completely supply all information, that pertains to the employment of each employee.
At this time they have 5 different modules that are all accessible from your web browser:

Talent Acquisition:

Candidate Tracker, Applicant Tracking, Tax Credits, Background Checks, On-boarding/off-Boarding, E-Verify.

Time and Labor Management:

Time and Attendance ,Schedule Exchange ,Time-Off Requests
Web Time Clocks ,Hardware Terminals , Labor Allocation Labor Management.

Talent Management:

Performance Management, Compensation Budgeting, Employee Self-Service, Executive Dashboard.

HR Management:

Document Management, Government & Compliance, Benefits Administration, Cobra Administration, Manager Self-Service, Personnel Action Forms, Surveys.

http://paycom.com/services/

Sales:

At the end of last quarter they had 36 sales teams up from 31 a year ago. Each of these sales teams have
From 6 to 9 sales professionals. They believe that some of the Metropolitan areas can have more than one sales teams. Paycom has 29 sales offices in 50 of the largest metropolitan statistical areas in the United States and only one of these is served by multiple sales teams. They have a direct sales model and it takes 24 months for a sales team to get to a mature state where they are selling optimally. In 2014 and 2015 they opened 5 sales offices. Paycom believes they can open well over a 100 offices in the United States. The CEO stated that he believes in growth but he wants to do it responsibly on the Topline and the margins. Chad Richison (CEO) states in the U.S. there is a market of over $20 billion. Paycom’s sales model does not require a contract. The customer pays month to month. In 2014 they had a 91% retention rate and once the customer is in the system they find it very sticky. This retention rate includes companies that were acquired or ceased to operate. Paycom targets customers with employees of 50 to 2000 but they are now getting customers that are much larger. They recently won a company with 3700 employees. They generate revenue from fixed amounts charged per billing period, plus a fee per employee or transaction process, or fixed amounts charged per billing period. Their billing period varies by client based on when they pay their employees, which is either weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly or monthly. Payc has a seasonal aspect to it. They file tax forms for their clients and this shows up in their revenue in the first quarter. Payc has over 12000 clients and none of them constitute more than one-half percent of revenues.

According to the International Data Corporation (“IDC”), the U.S. market for HCM applications is comprised of software that automates business processes covering the entire span of an employee’s relationship with his or her employer. IDC estimates that the U.S. market, excluding payroll services, will total $7.0 billion in 2015. These applications include maintenance of HR records, recruiting applications, performance management, time and labor management tracking, compliance, compensation management and other HR functions. According to IDC, the U.S. market for payroll services will be an estimated $16.8 billion in 2015. The payroll services market includes transactional activities associated with paying employees, maintaining accounting records and administrating payroll taxes while payroll accounting applications offer the functionality to effectively track these various payments and transfers.

IDC estimates that the international market for HCM applications (excluding the United States and payroll services) will be $5.2 billion in 2015.

The rise of cloud computing has supported the SaaS delivery model. According to IDC, the global SaaS market is projected to grow from $39 billion in 2013 to $103 billion in 2018, at a compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”) of 21%.

Competitors:

Ultimate Software, ADP, Ceridian Paychecks, ERP vendors,

Key Metrics:

Recurring revenue is what all SaaS lives off of. Paycom has a retention rate of 91% so as you can imagine if they can keep it at that rate they will be very profitable. This retention rate also shows that Payc has a very solid product.

Annualized new recurring revenue (ANRR). While we do not enter into long-term contractual commitments with our clients, we monitor annualized new recurring revenue as we believe it is an indicator of potential revenue for future periods. Annualized new recurring revenue is an estimate based on the annualized amount of the first full month of revenue attributable to new clients that were added or existing clients that purchased additional applications during the period presented. Annualized new recurring revenue only includes revenues from clients who have used our solution for at least one month during the period. Since annualized new recurring revenue is only recorded after a client uses our solution for one month, it includes revenue that has been recognized in historical periods.

Sales Teams.

We monitor our sales professionals by the number of sales teams at period end and each team is comprised of approximately six to nine sales professionals. Certain larger metropolitan areas can support more than one sales team. We believe that the number of sales teams is an indicator of potential revenue for future periods

Conclusion:

Payc has a subscription based model where they can add more modules onto their product to get larger revenues and make their product stickier. They just brought two more modules on line in the last quarter. One is Learning Management System or LMS. This is a powerful and flexible training system that is completely unified with the payroll and existing applications. Paycom also introduced a module that checks for compliance of the Affordable Care Act or ACA. This helps companies make sure they are compliant with all facets of the ACA. Once a company gets within the system it is harder for them to leave. Also with the company starting to grow they could have a long runway ahead of them. I like that they are bringing their sales teams up profitably. While it takes two years for a sales team to reach maturity where they bring optimal profits to the company we can see right now that the company has a nice rate of growth.


 **Revenue:**
2013: $27.6 $23.9 $25.8 $30.3 = $107.6
2014: $36.5 $33.3 $36.6 $44.0 =  $150.4
2015: $54.4


**EPS:**
2013: .05 .01 .00 .00 = .06
2014: .03 .04 .05 .06 = .18
2015: .12


**FCF**
2012                        $5,003
2013 $3,297   $6,067 $5,853 -$192
2014 -$3,429 -$3,385 $1,353 $8,067
2015 $10,634

1YPEG = .23
YOY Growth rate 575% Price $35.40 EPS .27

Q1 2015 Payc.

Balance Sheet

Payc has been improving their balance sheet. This quarter they have 35.7 million in cash with $862 thousand in debt. The cash has gone up from $25.5 million a year ago but debt has risen slightly from $855 thousand. The debt is the short term payment on their new corporate office in Oklahoma City, OK.

Income Statement

Payc Revenue was up from $36,985 to $55,222 an increase of 49%. Their portion of recurring revenue was $54,351 up from $36,454. Cost of Revenues was 7,471 which is 15% of Revenue down from YOY at 18.7% of Revenue. Sales and marketing was $21,229 up 35% YOY but as a percentage of Revenue down 4%. R and D was at $1,867 up 112% YoY but as a percentage of Revenue it was up 1%. General and Administrative was at $11,984 up 29% YoY but down 3.4% as a percentage of revenue. Total administrative expenses were up 35% YoY but as a percentage of Revenue it was actually down 6.9%. Adjusted earnings was at .12 up from .03 an increase of 300%, sequentially it was up 100%. EPS annually was up 575%. From $.04 to $.27. This strong growth of Revenue and Earnings allows the company to grow very fast. It also allows them to bring on more sales staff which is their biggest cost due to training, staffing, and the opening of new sales offices. Since it takes 24 months to bring on a new sales team to full operation these results were brought on with minimal help from the 10 sales teams, 5 brought on in 2014 and the other 5 brought on in 2015. When these 10 sales team come on line this should help to grow revenues and earning even further. Their ANRR for this quarter was $20.2 million up from $12.2 million. While this was up 65.5% we have to remember annualized this should be around 42.2%. They received a big boost this quarter from the income taxes they do for their customers.

Cash flow Statement

Free Cash Flow is growing very fast the last 3 quarters. They now have $10.4 million in fcf this quarter. Their stock based compensation is very low with only $254,000 dollars in stock based compensation. I thought that was really low so I went back and looked at their 10K and on the 10k for last year they had $712,000 in stock based compensation with Revenues of 150.9 million.

Andy
Long Payc

40 Likes

Thanks for the excellent write up Andy! Isn’t YOY growth rate 57.5% not 575%

Htownrich

2 Likes

I am getting confused on YOY growth rate. I was looking at revenue.

Htownrich

No problem Htown. Thanks for checking because sometimes I get my numbers wrong. I have yoy quarter revenue growth at 49.09%. Yoy quarter to quarter earnings growth at 300% and YoY TTM earnings growth at 575%.

Hope that is clear enough.

Andy

Thanks for the excellent write up!

I see the retention rate as staying high due to the difficulty in changing payroll systems. If the payroll processor is halfway decent,you will stick with them just because it is so much pain to change for a few dollars difference in price.

I see a proxy out there, offering to sell 8 million shares held by existing shareholders. I know that the initial funders want to get their money out at some point, but I don’t know if this will have an impact on the price or activities of PAYC. The CEO will still hold 11M shares after his portion of the sale - 1.5M shares, so he still has a large ~20% stake in the business.

I just took a small position - hopefully the growth will continue.
Thanks,
Jon

1 Like

Andy, +1 on the write up. I have been on the hunt for low 1YPEG stocks ever since it became apparent I was coming up fairly dry with my own holdings.

I too put my toe in to sample the waters today. I like their business model and the “blade” module offerings, the stickiness of their ecosystem (once bought-in), and the fact that more employers will be looking for these types of services as the economy continues to pick up.

Kudos for the great find!
–Kevin

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Kudos for the great find!

Thanks Kevin,
But I can’t take any credit for finding this. It was brought to the board by easyfix, and JonHarrison ran some numbers on it.

http://discussion.fool.com/payc-fast-growing-and-profitable-3177…

After digging into this company I really like the recurring revenues. The customer has to pay every month for the service. The bigger the sales teams get and the more companies they get into the ecosystem the higher the recurring revenue.

Andy

1 Like

Paycom seems to be under followed

this from Seeking Alpha

http://seekingalpha.com/article/2907756-paycom-looks-good-in…

407 people who get PAYC real-time alerts,
not exactly a thundering herd…

and FWIW (probably not much) some analyst opinion

http://sleekmoney.com/research-analysts-recent-ratings-chang…

from the MF link I liked this line

The platform does not need to access or integrate with multiple databases and it also collects data (in a single database) that employers can access and analyze in real time.

1 Like

In general, are there (or should there be) any special considerations for 1YPEG for a company that is just becoming profitable? Let’s say a company made $.01 per share in year 1 and $.08 per share in year 2. That’s a 800% increase, but I’m not sure it’s meaningful. What if in year 1 the earnings were just a smidge different, $.02?

I don’t really have an answer. I just know when I look at a company that’s been making profit for a few years, 1YPEG seems more valid that for one that is just turning the corner.

Having just read the knowledge base, my follow-on question would be, would a company that’s just starting to turn a profit tend to be more attractive than a solidly profitable company, less attractive, or a push?

This particular company has a very high PE (133) which is cautionary I suppose. They are also guiding for sequentially less profit in Q2, which has not been the recent pattern for them. Thanks.

7 Likes

Only question I have is whether Paycom and its sector is going to be caught up in the whole HR outsourcing mess that companies like Barrett Business Services (BBSI) have been embroiled in.
Ant

In general, are there (or should there be) any special considerations for 1YPEG for a company that is just becoming profitable? Let’s say a company made $.01 per share in year 1 and $.08 per share in year 2. That’s a 800% increase, but I’m not sure it’s meaningful. What if in year 1 the earnings were just a smidge different, $.02?

I don’t really have an answer. I just know when I look at a company that’s been making profit for a few years, 1YPEG seems more valid that for one that is just turning the corner.

Great questions Chris, I look at the 1YPEG as just one number and it must be used in context. I agree with you that the longer you can look at a company the better off you are. If I could only look at 1 quarter I don’t think it would have any meaning. The longer you can look at a company the better off you are. But the 1YPEG in itself can have problems because a company that is declining in profits can look really cheap also. So I think it is important to look at the profits and see if they are growing year over year also.

This particular company has a very high PE (133) which is cautionary I suppose. They are also guiding for sequentially less profit in Q2, which has not been the recent pattern for them. Thanks.

Your right Chris the P/E is very high and that should make you cautious. Do not go all in. But the P/E just like 1YPEG is just one point. This company is also growing very fast.

Payc Q2’s revenue since 2013, and since they became public, has always been lower than Q1. Q1 has always been given a boost because of tax season. Q2 in 2013 profits were lower but in Q2 of 2014 the profits were higher. We could go back to Q2 2014 and look at the financials to see how they made a higher profit in 2014 but since Revenues were lower, it just means they didn’t spend as much money on something.

Having just read the knowledge base, my follow-on question would be, would a company that’s just starting to turn a profit tend to be more attractive than a solidly profitable company, less attractive, or a push?

I would say that the company that is just starting to turn a profit might be under the radar and so might be cheaper.

All of the numbers we look at only help in the context of the stock. You can’t look at a stock and a 1YPEG or P/E and think you know the company. You need to understand the company and how it makes its money. It is important to read the conference calls and look at the financials. Even if you can not understand the financials completely their is important information in them that help you to understand.

I hope this helps Chris, great questions.

Andy
These are my thoughts

3 Likes

In general, are there (or should there be) any special considerations for 1YPEG for a company that is just becoming profitable?

We can take a look at what the 1YPEG might look like at the end of 2015. We can say earnings next quarter will be flat at 12 cents, then 14 cents in Sept and 16 cents in Dec, for a total of 54 cents. Probably not too far off, but who knows? This is just a mental exercise, after all.

PE = $36/0.54 = 67

Growth rate of trailing earnings is 54/18, which gives a gain of 200%

1YPEG = 67/200 = 0.33

Probably won’t be too far off, barring some catastrophe or other.

How about 2016, the year after? How about 1.00 for earnings. That gives a PE of 36, a growth rate of 85%, and thus a 1YPEG of 0.42. Not bad, but that’s keeping the stock price at $36, so we’ll need somewhat greater growth (or have to tolerate a higher PEG) to make much money on the stock.

By the way, I find PAYC very interesting. Thanks Andy.

Saul

7 Likes

No thank you Saul for your insight.

Saul is .12 for Q2 a guess, or just an example of how to think about my question? PAYC had EBITDA of $13.6m and EPS of .12 in Q1. In Q2 they are guiding for $8m EBITDA (see below), so a reduction of 41%. Won’t the EPS tend to mirror the EBITDA more or less? My best guess on EPS based on that would be .07. Or am I missing something. Maybe you think they are lowballing for Q2? Sincere thanks as always.

Financial Highlights for the First Quarter of 2015

Total Revenue of $55.2 million represented a 49.3% increase compared to total revenue of $37.0 million in the same period last year. Revenue growth was driven primarily by the addition of clients in mature sales offices. Revenue also benefited from an increase in the number of tax form filings on behalf of clients. Recurring revenues of $54.4 million increased 49.1% from the comparable prior year period, and comprised 98.4% of total revenues.

GAAP Net Income was $6.0 million, or $0.11 per diluted share, compared to GAAP net income of $1.1 million, or $0.02 per diluted share in the same period last year.

Adjusted EBITDA1 was $13.6 million, compared to $6.6 million in the same period last year.

Non-GAAP Net Income1 was $6.7 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, compared to $1.6 million, or $0.03 per diluted share, in the same period last year.

Annualized New Recurring Revenue (“ANRR”) was $20.2 million, up from $12.6 million for the same period last year, representing 60.5% growth from the comparable prior year period.

Cash and Cash Equivalents were $35.7 million as of March 31, 2015.

Total Debt was $26.5 million as of March 31, 2015. This debt consisted solely of debt on the corporate headquarters.

1 Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP net income are non-GAAP financial measures. Please see the discussion below under the heading “Use of Non-GAAP Financial Information” and the reconciliations at the end of this release for additional information concerning these non-GAAP financial measures.

Financial Outlook

Paycom provides the following expected financial guidance for the quarter ending June 30, 2015, and year ending December 31, 2015:

Second Quarter 2015

Total Revenues in the range of $45 million to $46 million.

Adjusted EBITDA in the range of $7.5 million to $8.5 million.

Fiscal Year 2015

Total Revenues in the range of $203 million to $205 million.

Adjusted EBITDA in the range of $35 million to $37 million.

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Saul is .12 for Q2 a guess?, or just an example of how to think about my question?

It’s just a guess, and also an example of how to think about it. While it looks like their revenue should come in about 49 or 50 million, I think 12 cents is probably too high. While second quarter is always less than first quarter because of tax season sales, it’s hard to imagine revenue would fall all the way from 55 to 45 with all those new sales teams coming on line. But what do I know?

Saul