Varda Chocolatier is a New Jersey-based maker of fine chocolates, with a team that includes hourly production staff and salaried employees who clock in through facial recognition units on-site. Julie Nieves, Varda’s HR Director, runs payroll and people operations for the company.
The Challenge
Varda’s previous payroll provider shipped employee checks via FedEx and UPS, and the system worked exactly as poorly as it sounds. Paychecks arrived after payday. Some never arrived at all. Reissuing lost checks became a recurring fire drill. And when Julie needed support, the answer was hold music, often for unclear amounts of time.
After her experience with the previous provider, Julie wasn’t sure any payroll vendor could really solve the problem. She was weighing her options: move to a legacy provider she knew would deliver more of the same, or pull payroll in-house and run it herself.
“I figured a smaller company wouldn’t be able to customize different fields at different rates,” she says, laughing about it now. “I didn’t know what customer service would be like. I thought everybody was overseas, somewhere at a different time zone on a different side of the planet.”
The Solution
What Julie found was the opposite of what she expected. Customization wasn’t a problem — Fingercheck handled the different pay rates and fields her team needed without workarounds. Customer service wasn’t an overseas call center — it was a small group of reps based in the US who picked up the chat and knew her by name. The “smaller company” she’d been wary of turned out to be exactly the right size to actually answer the phone.
Varda made the switch and consolidated payroll, time tracking, and HR support onto one platform. Employees now clock in through facial recognition units at the facility. Hourly and salaried staff are paid accurately each cycle. And critically, Varda issues their own checks directly, eliminating third-party shipping fees and the lost-check nightmare entirely.
Julie’s other unexpected win: the customer support. She works with a small handful of Fingercheck reps regularly, including one she calls out by name. “I speak to Jeremy a lot. If there’s anything I don’t know how to do, he’ll show me step-by-step. That’s amazing. It helps when someone is actually there and can show you the ropes.”
The Results
- 10 hours saved every month on payroll, with on-time pay runs and direct check issuance replacing the third-party mail delivery that used to fail constantly.
- 5+ hours saved every month on HR admin through chat support that lets Julie get answers on her own schedule instead of waiting on hold.
- Eliminated third-party check fees by printing checks in-house instead of paying per-check delivery costs to an outside service.
- Faster pay cycles with options like next-day payroll, recently extended to an 8pm submission cutoff.
- A real relationship with support reps, which Julie credits as the difference between “I have a payroll provider” and “I have a team I can call.”
“It definitely saves me time, because instead of waiting on hold for God-knows-how-long, it’s very easy that I can chat. That saves me time, which in turn saves me money. I’m printing my own checks here, so I’m not paying that additional service another third party might charge.”
– Julie Nieves, HR Director at Varda Chocolatier
