At Mercado Bitcoin, one person closes payroll for around 400 employees in a day.

Priscilla Brum runs HR operations at Mercado Bitcoin, a team that closes payroll for around 400 people and is measured by the data it delivers, because what comes out of it feeds accounting, tax and controlling.

The bar sits even higher because a company dealing in crypto assets meets suspicion as the default reaction from outside, and auditors come through four times a year.

Before the change, Mercado Bitcoin already ran payroll in house, with its own payroll team, and digital onboarding sat in a separate system belonging to their occupational health and safety partner. Priscilla was the one carrying information from one to the other, and a mistyped bank detail only surfaced when the payment file was generated.

Reports had the same problem, because what came out of the system had to be cleaned up by hand before another analyst could use it, so any question about who was where and under which contract went through Priscilla. The close did not end when payroll closed either: days of reports for accounting, tax form generation and filings followed it, with the month's accounting and tax consolidation dragging behind all of that.

That arrangement ate the team's month, and what bothered her most was not being able to fix any of it, because the tools they had would not let her. That is where the phrase a manager said to Priscilla when the two started working together comes from: “Hold on to that anger of yours, because that anger is good.”

A payroll system review never shows that limit, because the comparison sheet has a row for closing time and error rate and none for everything the team will not get to build. That cost never lands in a report, and it was what led Priscilla to accept the risk of changing: “It really came down to that decision: let us take the risk of changing. Because every change gives you that flutter in your stomach. It is about breaking the vicious circle.”

Point by point, Tako solved what was blocking the operation: onboarding is filled in by the candidate and lands in payroll without anyone copying data in between, the employee data report comes out standardised and usable by anyone without cleanup, the close ends on the day it ends, and the accounting team goes into Tako and pulls what it needs on its own.

When Priscilla lists why her team got where it got, she starts with how easy the tool is to use and how clear the data is, which she calls democratic information because anyone can read it without help. What set Tako apart from the other vendors under review was the open API: “It is going to sound silly, but that is what made the decision: the open API.”

An open API sounds like a topic for the engineering team, and what is actually at stake is dependency: much of the payroll market makes money from the customer needing the vendor for every change, and opening the data so the customer can build on it without asking permission takes that arrangement apart.

A little over a year after the switch, Priscilla had already built, without asking Tako for anything, an internal tool connected to the platform that she feeds in one place and pulls the people P&L from, combining payroll, termination and holiday reports to send ready to FP&A.

The date came out of a two minute conversation between Priscilla and her counterpart in finance, who agreed on the switch, asked each other whether they were up for it and settled it right there.

They were expecting the familiar hell of a payroll migration, with registry re-keying and line by line checking, and the rollout came driven by eSocial, which already holds the company's full employee registry, so the re-keying never happened. Two people on their side took part, and Priscilla puts it at about four hours of her own time.

The friction sat on Tako's side, where the team serving them turned over three or four people, and January, February and March were hard months until Jéssica took over and changed the process.

Under the old arrangement payroll closed on the 27th, and after that came about two days building reports for accounting and about three days of tax forms and filings, with Priscilla making that bridge by hand.

Today the accounting team goes in the day after the close and pulls what it needs straight from Tako without going through her, onboarding runs end to end with the candidate filling in their own details, and every entry returns the final figure on the spot.

When she talks about what changed, Priscilla puts data reliability above time, because information started originating at the source, with the candidate typing in what belongs to them.

The employee data report became the company's reference on who is who, to the point where the HR business partner, who is not even on the team, goes in, runs the report and resolves what she needs without going through Priscilla.

The gain almost nobody anticipates when reviewing a vendor came from that report being standardised and from her being able to choose what she pulls from it, because a standard is exactly what a person needs in order to write code on top, and that is where her automation started.

Priscilla drops payroll, termination and holiday reports into the tool she built, generates the people P&L and sends it ready to FP&A, which she sums up as simple as that.

With the close fitting into one person, the conversation between her team and controlling turned to consolidated figures and to what comes next, and almost never to payroll that closed or a termination that went out wrong.

Earlier this year she won an internal award at MB Week, and the CFO, talking about it in front of the company, referred to Priscilla as “the person responsible for the Tako rollout”.

Priscilla is now moving from HR operations into a cross functional role in controlling, working on projects, because of what she delivered there.

What Priscilla describes as the company's path from here runs through opening up access to crypto and through financial education for people who still watch the sector from a distance, with partners who can speak to those audiences.

Mercado Bitcoin is a reference in its sector, and it was the company that gave the team the room to change: HR operations got where it got because there was a chance to try.