Founded in 2022 in the UAE, by Ayham Gorani, Alesandro Duri, Valerie Konde, and Saed Ghorani, Pemo was established to revolutionize expense management processes for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Middle East. They currently provide expense management solutions throughout the middle east including: UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and even Pakistan.

The concept stemmed from the CEO and Co-Founder Ayham’s first hand struggles with managing petty cash and business expenses in his own ventures. His vision, along with the unique expertise of his co-founders, shaped Pemo’s expense management platform.

With a core focus on simplifying expense management and automating transactions with corporate credit cards, Pemo aims to help SMEs by integrating all financial activity into accounting software seamlessly.

The Founding Team

Ayham spearheaded the platform’s conceptualization based on his own personal experience. Co-founder and COO, Alesandro’s background in launching startups in Southeast Asia and the Middle East was essential in helping the team hit the ground running. Ayham and Alesandro worked alongside Valerie, Co-founder and COO, who provided essential industry insights as a result of her experience in creating an expense management app in Europe before joining the Pemo founding team. Saed, Co-founder and CTO, used his previous experience in co-founding a different successful venture in the past to provide essential insights on how to become successful.

The HR Team

The Pemo HR team consists of Tasneem, Head of People and Culture, and Nicole, her right hand, and Senior People and Culture Specialist. These ladies are truly the stars of the show. They single handedly built Pemo’s HR department from the ground up.

HR Challenges Before palmHR

At the start of their journey, Pemo faced challenges managing HR operations as a young company with a lean team. Without a scalable HR system, they relied heavily on Excel sheets and Notion pages, leading to chaos and disorganization. Managing a remote workforce across different regions compounded the difficulty, as they needed tools to handle varied regional holidays, team schedules, and effective leave management. Initial attempts to adopt another HR tool fell short, due to the complexity and missing functionality of other tools causing the other them to be unsuitable for Pemo’s needs.

Why palmHR?

The Pemo HR team was in search of a flexible, user-friendly, Middle East-focused HR solution, to help solve their daily struggles, and which would help save them time so they could focus on the important aspects of their roles. In their search for the right HR tool, they came across palmHR. They were immediately drawn to the platform's ability to centralize all employee data, simplify payroll, while accommodating regional differences effortlessly.

“What I love most about palmHR is that everyone on the team is so responsive. They take the time to listen, and we see concrete solutions to our challenges.” – Nicole, HR Team

Pemo’s palmHR experience

Using palmHR transformed Pemo’s HR operations. They were able to easily access a centralized system using palmHR’s employee data management feature which allowed them to store and track all employee information in one place.

The mobile app allowed the Pemo team to easily submit leave requests, view and process employee documents, such as HR letters, and quickly and smoothly process payroll.

“Our team finds it easy and intuitive, which makes adoption so much smoother.” – Tasneem

The payroll management feature, integrated with QuickBooks, significantly streamlined payslip generation and distribution saving time and costs. Employees now have instant access to their payslips, even from their mobile devices.

“palmHR made my life easier; it is my go-to app for HR Operations.” – Nicole

Getting started with palmHR

The Pemo HR team began with palmHR in July 2023, when asked about their implementation journey, they said that the implementation journey with palmHR was seamless and well-supported. Tasneem and Nicole stated that unlike their experience with previous HR tools, palmHR provided a comprehensive onboarding experience with dedicated sessions to explore system features. Nicole said that the palmHR team ensured smooth data migration, which made the transition to the platform organized and easy.

“PalmHR gave us real support during setup, which made a huge difference. Weekly sessions and full data migration support made implementation easy.” – Nicole

Results and Benefits

Pemo has achieved significant improvements in HR management with palmHR:

• Saved time: The real-time notifications and automatic payroll generation save valuable time and reduce manual work for the team.
• Cost Effective: Prior to using palmHR, the Pemo team had outsourced payslip generation, which became an expensive monthly venture. The palmHR payroll tool has allowed their team to be able to get away from outsourcing payroll, they now handle payroll in-house, saving on expenses.
• User Experience: Nicole and Tasneem agreed that the intuitive interface of the palmHR mobile and web applications allow the team to access their team’s information conveniently making it simpler and faster to manage leave tracking efficiently.

“The mobile app lets me submit requests anywhere, and the live chat is fantastic; it’s a real person helping you out.” – Nicole

PalmHR has become an integral part of Pemo’s HR operations, empowering the company to manage HR processes with efficiency and ease. The platform’s user-friendly interface, responsive support, and localization features align perfectly with Pemo’s needs as a growing, regionally-focused startup.

“Special shout out to Mo, Malak and Yasmin, who have been incredible in supporting all our requests and projects. They have been essential to our experience with palmHR.” – Nicole