How brightwheel unified its global workforce on one platform

About brightwheel

Brightwheel builds software for early childhood education, helping childcare providers run their programs, manage their teams, and stay connected with families. The company operates fully remote across the US, with a growing international presence spanning nearly 10 countries.

The challenge: one company, two platforms

As brightwheel scaled quickly, the team started hiring internationally to access talent in key markets. What started as a handful of hires in the UK and Canada expanded steadily. The Pakistan team alone reached nearly 80 people. By 2026, brightwheel has roughly 130 employees and contractors across nearly 10 countries.

Back in the US, the company ran its people operations on Rippling — where People Operations Manager Sarah Kulhanek and her team had built automated onboarding flows, HR request and approval processes, and an internal support system employees relied on for day-to-day support. But team members on Deel had no access to any of it.

When someone in Pakistan had an HR question, there was no ticketing system for them to use. Onboarding a new international hire was manual from start to finish. Running variable commissions meant navigating into each country's pay run and entering every employee's amount one at a time.

The solution: one platform for every employee

When brightwheel consolidated its global team onto Rippling, the impact showed up across every part of how Sarah's team operates.

Onboarding that runs itself

In Deel, onboarding an international employee was a largely manual process with limited ability to customize steps by role or country. In Rippling, Sarah built automated onboarding flows that handle everything from document collection to system access to first-day workflows, customized for different countries and roles.

What used to take close to an hour now takes 10 minutes per employee.

Global payroll without the manual work

Previously, running variable commissions for the offshore team meant navigating into each country's pay run individually, then clicking into each employee's record to manually enter their amount. In Rippling, Sarah uploads a single CSV file and the platform automatically matches and applies every entry across the entire team.

Adjusting commission went from more than two hours to five minutes — a 96% reduction. Across a team of nearly 80 people, payroll that used to take up most of a morning now takes less time than a coffee break.

One process, for every employee

When brightwheel consolidated onto Rippling, global employees didn't just get a new payroll system — they got access to everything the US team had always had. A Philippines-based team member joining today goes through the same automated onboarding sequence, is visible in the same org chart, and can submit HR requests through the same ticketing system as anyone in the US.

One view of the whole workforce

Part of Sarah's role is pulling headcount by country, compliance status, and employee records for the organization. When brightwheel's global team lived in Deel, that meant extracting information from two separate systems and reconciling what each one showed. Any report that needed to reflect the full organization required manual steps to clean and reconcile the data.

On Rippling, Sarah runs workforce reports across every country from one place. The entire organization — US and international — is visible in the same dashboard.

What's next

With every employee now running on one platform, brightwheel has the foundation to keep building. As the team expands into new markets, Sarah isn't starting from scratch each time. The onboarding flows, reporting dashboards, and payroll processes she's built in Rippling already work for whoever joins next, wherever they are.