Every27 — AI-Augmented Multi-Tenant Payroll Platform

The brief

Build a payroll platform for Nigerian SMEs that does more than calculate net pay — it should run salary advances, give employees their own wallet, and use AI to answer the accounting questions every founder ends up Googling at 2 a.m.

What we built

• Multi-tenant architecture — every company onboarded gets a fully isolated workspace.
• Employee onboarding — KYC, bank verification, tax IDs, contract upload.
• Automated payroll — schedule monthly, fortnightly, or custom; auto-generate payslips; handle PAYE, pensions and statutory deductions for Nigeria.
• Salary advances — employees can draw against accrued salary, employer-controlled limits.
• Employee wallets — Paystack-backed digital wallets with cards and transfers.
• AI accounting assistant — embedded Claude-powered assistant that answers payroll, tax, and reporting questions grounded in the company’s own data.

How we built it

CodeIgniter 4 was a deliberate choice: fast, well-understood by Nigerian developers, and easy to operate on shared infrastructure if a customer needs to self-host. Multi-tenancy is row-level with a tenant middleware enforcing query scoping at the model layer.

The AI assistant uses retrieval-augmented prompts — every Claude API call is grounded in the company’s payroll data, so it can answer “what was my total PAYE liability last quarter” with a real number, not a guess.

Outcome

A payroll-plus-fintech platform that takes a category usually dominated by spreadsheets and gives Nigerian SMEs the kind of integrated tooling normally reserved for enterprises ten times their size.