Albert Torres

10 years at Pay Plus Benefits as the Director of Information Technology
and Research & Development. Pay Plus Benefits now host over 300,000
employee records along with over 10,000 company financial records on a
web based nation wide data warehousing solution.

Some past awards for Pay Plus Benefits.

-   Awarded First Place in Washington CEO annual competition for \"Best
    Companies in Washington to Work For\" (2000).

-   One of 14 winners in the Inc./Cisco Growing with Technology Awards
    for 2000 \"Innovators in Sales & Marketing\".

-   Pay Plus Benefits ranks 28th in Top 100 Washington Technology
    Companies (1999)

Past work experiences include Microsoft Corporation and the Washington
State Employment Security.

-   Undergraduate Degree in Management Information Systems from
    Washington State University graduated *Summa Cum Laude*.

-   Current vice president of Washington State University Chapter of
    Beta Gamma Sigma which is the Business National Honor Society.

-   Past chair of the South Eastern Chapter of the Washington Software
    Alliance.

-   Past member of the WSU Business Club

Below is an article for from the Tri-City Herald that describes a little
bit more how Albert\'s company found themselves in the web based data
warehousing business.

Here is a past article from the Tri-City Herald.

## Building on benefits

*This story was published Sunday, March 14th, 2004*

**By Jeff St. John**

![](media/image1.jpeg){width="5.995138888888889in"
height="4.009722222222222in"}

The birth of a new business plan came without warning to Albert Torres.
In late 2000, Torres, information technology manager for Kennewick
business Pay Plus Benefits, was at a conference for professional
employer organizations in Chicago, showing off his new system for
handling employee payroll records online.

Professional employer organizations, or PEOs, handle payroll, benefits
and human resources services for smaller companies that don\'t want to
handle complicated personnel matters themselves. By pooling lots of
small businesses into one big work force, PEOs also can get deals on
health insurance and retirement benefits that small businesses can only
dream about.

Founded in 1990, Pay Plus Benefits office now serves as the employer of
record for about 100 small-business clients with about 1,500 employees.
In the past two years, the 17-employee company has seen annual gross
sales of about \$1.4 million.

Back in 1999, Torres has been searching in vain for a system to allow
his clients, their employees and their clients to access detailed labor
force data over the Internet without sacrificing privacy.

\"We would have bought it if it was available,\" Torres said. He
couldn\'t find the software he wanted, so \"we built it ourselves.\"

After his presentation, Torres was swamped with requests for his
software from the PEO managers at the conference.

\"They said, forget how you did it \-- can we buy it?\" he recalled.

Since 2000, Pay Plus Benefits has grown that interest into a brand new
business. Pay Plus Solutions earned \$120,000 in revenue last year and
is on track for revenues of \$200,000 this year, said Carol Stults,
Director of Business Development.

\"We came to an understanding that our technology had a market,\" Stults
said.

Now e-Tools, Torres\' Web-based system for collecting and distributing
personnel payroll records, is in use by 26 clients with a collective
workforce of about 160,000.

For John Heaton, Pay Plus Benefits founder and president, it\'s an
unexpected payoff for making his own business work better.

\"The PEO business is the best laboratory we have,\" he said. \"We were
our own first client.\"

Pay Plus Benefits has won a number of accolades for its success as a
PEO, including a 1996 place on Inc. magazine\'s list of 500
fastest-growing companies and a place on Washington CEO magazine\'s list
of \"Best Companies to Work For\" in 2000.

In a sense, the difficulties Torres faced trying to find a system for
his own office are the same faced by most small businesses, Heaton said.

\"There are several large companies with payroll products that have Web
modules,\" such as human resources software giant PeopleSoft, he said.
But those products tend to be both too expensive and too complicated for
small businesses to handle, he said.

Pay Plus Benefits primarily serves professional office clients, he said.
Many of them do business with the government or may want to pitch their
business to investors, which means they need to make detailed labor cost
information available to outsiders, he said.

Also, most of Pay Plus Benefits clients operate in more than one state,
he said. That means managers need to be able to communicate personnel
information to each other quickly, to do tasks like prepare budgets for
departments that have employees spread across a number of locations.

But keeping that kind of information on the Internet requires
24-hour-a-day Web server monitoring, he said. It also takes a dedication
to making sure private information can\'t be accessed by people who
aren\'t supposed to see it \-- key when the same system is being used by
employees and outside clients.

Solving those problems gave Torres plenty of headaches last year, as he
and three other information technology staff prepared for the launch of
e-Tools.

\"That was a pretty ugly year,\" Heaton said. \"But we made the
commitment that for our service, we\'re going to be 24/7.\"

Pay Plus Benefits client Pam Henderson, owner of marketing firm Meridian
Strategies in Richland, said she\'s found plenty of uses for e-Tools.

\"You can manipulate that data to do some pretty significant statistical
analysis to learn about your labor costs,\" Henderson said. The fact
that e-Tools updates its data on a daily basis means she\'s never
working with old information, she added.

\"Anything that I can outsource that allows me to focus on what I\'m
good at, and gives other people the opportunity to do what they\'re good
at \... that\'s one of my basic strategies,\" she said.

Now that e-Tools is up and running, Torres and his crew are working on
the next Pay Plus Solutions product \-- a Web-based hiring system.

Called \"Employee on Board,\" the system will allow newly-hired
employees to go online to fill out their W-4 forms and all the other
paperwork the government requires. The hiring business then gets the
information in electronic form for quick processing, and both the
business and employee get printouts as backup.

\"We see that as a very large stand-alone market,\" Heaton said.

Of course, as Pay Plus Benefits continues to sign on new clients, both
as a PEO and as a technology company, it may find plenty of use for its
own hiring system.

\"We\'ll continue to expand,\" Heaton said. \"We\'ll be growing
dramatically, and we\'ll be staying right here.\"