Forbes Advisor was holding together a tech stack that held them back. Payroll ran in multiple countries, handoffs lived in inboxes, and basic tasks ate hours the team didn’t have. Senior Director of Human Resources Paige Erickson remembered, “We were actually processing five different payrolls on five different platforms monthly.” That fragmentation meant duplicated work, more room for errors, and slowdowns whenever Finance needed international reporting or managers needed access.

The strain showed up in the employee experience, too. Without a unified flow, “Onboarding used to take me 30 minutes [per person],” Paige said. Multiply that by hiring spikes or global cohorts, and you get the picture: HR spent time pushing data between tools instead of running a reliable, auditable process. Paige’s takeaway was clear—keeping this patchwork of chaotic systems in place wasn’t just inconvenient; it was a barrier to Forbes Advisor’s growth.

I don’t have a single headache about Rippling. If you have internal support, it’s worth it.

Paige Erickson

Senior Director of Human Resources at Forbes Advisor

Forbes Advisor consolidated onto Rippling to run HR, payroll, and benefits from one platform, cut over at year-end, and created a faster, better experience for both stakeholders and employees.

Meet Forbes Advisor

Forbes Advisor is a fast-growing global platform that moves very quickly and expects its internal systems to keep pace. Its employees are tech-savvy and expect a modern, intuitive UX, but with a stack of disconnected tools, that wasn’t the reality. The team was “shouldering five separate payrolls” while Finance waited on reports and managers waited on access, Paige says—and every handoff was a potential failure point they couldn’t afford as the company scaled globally.

Paige had evaluated Rippling years earlier, and returned to it in March 2024, aligning stakeholders after taking part in demos. Her goal was one system that “worked across countries and spoke finance’s language” so HR could move quickly without sacrificing control. But once she had executive buy-in, Paige had to move fast to consolidate Forbes Advisor’s chaotic, disconnected tech stack to Rippling’s unified system by her target go-live date.

“We implemented in just under 10 weeks,” she said. “It was a really short runway to get everything up and running for Jan. 1.”

How Forbes Advisor turned 5 chaotic platforms into 1 controlled system

The switch began with a reckoning. As Paige put it, “The day I counted them—five different payrolls every month on five different platforms—I stopped pretending we could duct-tape our way through another year.” She set a year-end cutover to keep reporting clean and rallied stakeholders around the short runway: around 10 weeks until the first payroll run in January. 

Discipline, good planning, and parallel work helped Paige and her team pull off the short implementation timeline.

First, she drew a hard line between Day One must-haves and Q1 nice-to-haves. 

• What went live on Jan. 1: US benefits and payroll, data imports, and core workflows like hiring, onboarding, time approval, and offboarding. 
• Rollouts in other countries were staggered depending on their local tax calendars—Australia went live on Jan. 1, the UK in April, and Italy in May—so global implementation didn’t get in the way of the US go-live.

Two mindsets kept momentum high:

1. Sequence for business impact. As Paige summed it up, “We got the big stuff done.”
2. Move in parallel. You don’t have to complete one thing to move on; Paige’s team implemented many things in parallel so they could keep moving forward and land the essentials without waiting for everything to be perfect.

Paige’s plan paid off. She said “it was the best implementation experience that I have gone through” compared to four HRIS systems she’s implemented previously in her career. She credited this to the product knowledge of Rippling’s implementation team, and the structure of having implementation led by one point of contact who brings in product-specific implementation specialists for specific steps of the implementation. “It helps streamline the process. Everything is moving in parallel.”

For teams following this path, Paige shared her week-by-week playbook that you can borrow to make your own HR system switch:

Forbes Advisor’s 8‑week switch playbook

Weeks 0–1: Exit and align

• Pull every contract, term, and notice clause; send notices early
• Secure CFO/Finance + IT stakeholders; clarify success metrics and data owners
• Start a 30-minute weekly standup with stakeholders

Weeks 1–3: Configure the must‑haves

• Stand up US benefits administration and payroll first
• Map org structure, cost centers, GLs
• Confirm finance exports and integrations

Weeks 2–5: Global/EOR planning

• Sequence countries by compliance deadlines (e.g., UK tax year) and business needs
• Collect localized documents
• Define entity‑specific workflows

Weeks 3–6: Templates and automation

• Build country‑specific onboarding packets and e‑sign requirements
• In Workflow Studio, create automations that take HR work out of your inbox

Weeks 5–7: Train and over‑communicate

• Run manager training
• Show Finance where reports live and how to schedule them
• Draft country‑specific comms so every employee knows what changes and when. Our folks literally commented that onboarding was “so intuitive”—that’s the tone you want to set

Week 8: Go‑live and staggered global cutovers

• Go live in the US on Jan. 1
• Plan country go‑lives to match local calendars. Keep daily check‑ins for the first pay cycle

How Forbes Advisor got stakeholder buy-in (fast)

Paige treated Finance and IT as co-owners from day one—not approvers at the end. That meant bringing both teams into demos early and showing them proof, not promises.

For Finance, the proof was threefold: how payroll journals post directly into the ERP, how they can self-serve scheduled reports, and how a monthly “Starters & Leavers” report could be automated—created and sent to Finance and other stakeholders in every country on the first of every month without anyone lifting a finger. “[Finance] could be owners of their own reporting,” Paige said. “They could jump in and report on whatever they needed to.”

With IT, she made the “yes” easy by eliminating the ticket treadmill. For example, once a new hire accepts their offer, access and device setup fire automatically and managers receive their pre-start checklists—no email tag, no chasing. Showing that one workflow in context (offer → access → day-one-readiness) made the value prop obvious for IT stakeholders.

The takeaway here for other HR pros? Anchor buy-in to visible outcomes each team cares about. Paige’s approach turned Finance into genuine partners and turned IT into advocates, giving both teams back time and control where it counts.

How Forbes Advisor created a faster, better employee experience

Before the switch, Paige said Forbes Advisor’s previous HRIS felt “a bit dated and convoluted,” which made even routine tasks like reviews “a little bit of an embarrassment on the HR side.” Paige set out to find a platform that was intuitive, modern, and that “employees actually enjoyed jumping in there and working.”

That’s exactly what employees feel using Rippling. Not only does Forbes Advisor now have one modern app for employees to access their documents, reviews, training, and other information. Hiring volume is no longer a bottleneck, either. With Rippling, Paige can now bulk-onboard employees with country-specific packets and acknowledgements. Onboarding new hires dropped from 30 frustrating minutes per employee to just five.

“We received responses from employees saying it was so intuitive,” Paige said. “We even had people write on the feed saying it was so much better than X, calling out our old HRIS system.”

The experience stays smooth because so much of the heavy lifting is automated. As Paige puts it, “We’re a well-oiled machine. When one thing happens over here, it triggers all of these other elements… I don’t have to even think twice about it once something is triggered.” Rippling’s Workflow Studio, where she can create custom automations, is a “game changer,” she said.

“I don’t have a single headache about Rippling,” Paige added. “If you have internal support, it’s worth it.”

How Forbes Advisor plans to grow with Rippling

With the core foundation live, Paige is clear that the build isn’t done—it’s expanding. Here’s what’s next for Rippling and Forbes Advisor:

• Move ATS onto Rippling. “We still had a year on our contract with our current ATS, and then we’re going to move over to Rippling,” Paige said.
• Bring critical trackers onto Rippling to eliminate spreadsheets. One example is a new hire tracker that Paige plans to build in Rippling as a custom object.
• Continue expanding automations as the team learns. Paige plans to keep adding to the existing workflow automations Forbes Advisor has created so far. “The longer you’re on the Rippling platform, you start to understand the platform more,” she said. “You also start to get more creative with how you wanna use the platform… we’re not done yet.”

As Paige put it, “We’re in the thick of really building Rippling out. Once you get your foundation set up, you can really start building.”