Dayforce Inc (NYSE:DAY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Dayforce Inc (NYSE:DAY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 1, 2024

Dayforce Inc misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.43 EPS, expectations were $0.45. Dayforce Inc isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Jeremy Johnson: Welcome to the Dayforce First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. I am Jeremy Johnson, our CFO, and joining me on the call today is CEO, David Ossip, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Joe Korngiebel; and our President, Steve Holdridge. [Operator Instructions] Now, before I hand the call over to David, I want to remind everyone that our commentary may include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause Dayforce’s results to differ materially from historical experience or present expectations. A description of some of these risks and uncertainties can be found in the reports we filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission such as the cautionary statements in our filings.

Additionally, over the course of this call, we’ll reference non-GAAP measures to describe our performance. Please review our earnings press release and filings with the SEC for our rationale behind the use of non-GAAP measures and for a full reconciliation of these GAAP to non-GAAP metrics. These documents, in addition or a replay of this call, will be available on the Dayforce Investor Relations website. And with that, I’d like to turn the call over to David.

A software developer looking out a window while confidently typing away on their laptop.

David Ossip: Thanks, Jeremy, and thank you all for joining us. Next to me, I have Steve, who will review customer and market highlights, Joe, who will highlight platform innovation, and then we’ll hand the call back to Jeremy to provide details to our first quarter performance and updated full-year outlook. In the first quarter, I’m pleased to report another strong quarter for Dayforce. We grew both revenue and profit materially, and we exceeded guidance across all key revenue and profitability metrics. Dayforce recurring revenue of $337 million, was up 24% including float, and 23% excluding float, and total revenue of $431.5 million increased 16%. On the profitability side, GAAP gross profit was $205 million, up 28% from last year, cloud recurring gross margin was 79%, up 170 basis points versus last year, and adjusted cloud recurring gross margin was 80%, up 130 basis points versus last year.

Adjusted EBITDA was $130 million, up 23%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 30.1%, up 170 basis points versus last year. We remain confident in the business, with strong momentum across sales, product, and operations, and we have raised our guidance across all key metrics. As we look at the rest of the year and well beyond it, the HCM market opportunity is very large and continues to expand. Estimates of global HCM and managed payroll spending are currently in the $50 billion to $60 billion range and growing at over 10% annually, based on a Dayforce analysis of IDC data. This continues to be a resilient and durable market of growth. Dayforce is well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity in front of us, as organizations of all sizes across the world need to be more productive and to optimize their technology and processes.

Leaders need to create quantifiable value for their organizations and better experiences for their people with the platforms they choose, and Dayforce meets that demand by providing simplicity at scale. Simplicity at scale is at the core of our product innovation, particularly as we accelerate with our AI capabilities, with Dayforce Co-Pilot for both our customers, and inside our organization. As we’ve discussed, our approach to AI is built on our foundation of trusted compliance and a single source of data. We launched the chartered version of Dayforce Co-Pilot, and have seen our initial customers and their employees utilize Co-Pilot as an AI teammate to help supercharge productivity. We believe there are numerous use cases across our customer base to help them gain a competitive advantage by using Dayforce Co-Pilot.

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Q&A Session

Internally, it’s been very exciting to see how Co-Pilot has significantly enhanced the Dayforce experience within our own Dayforce environment, answering questions and surfacing critical company content to help our daymakers be more productive every day. Joe will share more on our progress shortly, but I’m very encouraged with our pace of innovation. Finally, I’m happy to announce an appointment of our new Chief People Officer, Amy, who joined Dayforce and our leadership team this week. Amy brings extensive experience, driving business growth through talent training and development, workforce engagement and exclusivity, and operational efficiencies. Welcome to the team, Amy. In summary, we had a strong start to 2024, and I remain excited for the year ahead.

I’d like to thank our strong community, our customers, partners, and daymakers. I’ll now pass the call to Steve to discuss customer and market highlights. Steve, over to you.

Steve Holdridge: Thanks, David. In Q1, we delivered balanced and consistent growth across customer acquisition, activation, expansion, and retention. We had strong results for sales, kickoffs, and go lives. We ended the quarter with Dayforce recurring revenue per customer up 19% year-over-year, and we now have 6,575 customers live on the Dayforce platform. From a sales perspective, we continue to see strong demand for Dayforce across the globe, and saw an acceleration of competitive wins in our mid-market segment as a compliment to the continued expansion in our enterprise segments we’ve talked about before. Sales pipeline remains healthy, and we see steady demand for the Dayforce full suite platform in all regions. Our partner ecosystem momentum continued into Q1, with SI-led sales growth up 35% year-over-year.

We continued to demonstrate the strength of our overall Dayforce platform, attaching full suite to nearly 50% of new sales bookings. We also saw continued performance across our customer base sales motion, with customer add-on sales comprising nearly 40% of total bookings, including significant growth in our talent intelligence suite. And on Dayforce Wallet, we saw healthy traction, with over 1,200 customers live and 1,960 new customers added in total. Average wallet registration rates continued to trend positively, remaining above 65%, and we continue with healthy wallet usage of about 25 times per month. We also launched two new revenue-generating features to Wallet in the first quarter, instant transfer, which allows users to move money off the card instantly using credit rails for a fee, and cash app transfer, which allows users to move money to cash apps and provides Dayforce with the interchange revenue.

We received positive news out of the government of Canada, which secured additional budget to progress the payroll modernization project. We expect to see continued investment in the program and expanded opportunity for Dayforce and our partners, with potential acceleration of related revenues in 2025. Now, turning to key sales wins from across the globe in Q1. A large Canadian grocer is expanding its existing Dayforce partnership with the addition of Dayforce talent to support more than 100,000 employees. A US energy company with 17,000 employees has selected Dayforce for payroll and workforce management. One of the world’s leading independent insurance brokers, has chosen the full Dayforce suite for 9,300 employees in 29 countries. Western Digital Technologies, a global provider of disk drives and flash memories, is expanding its existing partnership with Dayforce by adding managed payroll for 8,000 employees in the US.

Carhartt selected Dayforce as its global people platform for 3,500 employees across seven countries. One of the top 10 dental support organizations in the US selected Dayforce as a strategic partner to support 5,000 employees. Some of the key Q1 customer go lives included, an international real estate developer and property manager, launched Dayforce managed payroll, managed benefits, time and attendance, to 22,000 US employees, a global manufacturing and retail organization with 65,000 employees across 56 countries, extended its Dayforce use to include its Malaysian operations. Windstream Holdings went live with the full Dayforce suite for 9,500 employees across the US and Canada. A global analytics professional services company with over 35,000 employees in 40 countries, expanded its Dayforce use to 6,000 UK employees.

And a California grocery chain with 18,000 employees in 170 locations, went live with Dayforce managed pay, time, attendance, and advanced scheduling. With that, I’m now pleased to hand off to my innovation partner, Joe Korngiebel, our Chief Product and Technology Officer. Joe, over to you.

Joe Korngiebel: Thank you, Steve. We had a fast and exciting start to 2024 in terms of product innovation. As you heard from David, with the launch of Dayforce Co-Pilot to our charter customers at the beginning of the year, our new generative AI teammate for the boundless workforce is empowering our customers, their employees, and also our own employees here at Dayforce with new levels of productivity and efficiency. This cutting-edge innovation marks a significant milestone in our commitment to make work life better for our customers and their entire workforce. Dayforce Co-Pilot provides instant answers to common workforce questions from the data that is often buried within large employee handbooks, detailed benefits guides, and lengthy corporate FAQs. Powered by our best-in-class data and per customer large language model architecture, we are just beginning the innovation with Dayforce Co-Pilot.

We are now expanding beyond our initial answering questions and summarizing data use cases, into full-fledged task automation and content generation with generative AI, and it’s all within the seamless in-context Dayforce Co-Pilot user experience. As we iterate and continue this transformative journey, we extend our sincere gratitude to our early customers for their invaluable partnership and feedback. Together, we are truly shaping the future of work and setting a new standard of excellence in our industry. We are delivering Dayforce Co-Pilot as a new simply priced add-on to our entire suite of HCM products. As you can tell, I’m excited about the value that our customers are starting to realize with Dayforce Co-Pilot and the massive impact that a single system that provides a single source of truth for their people data, can have on their business.

In addition to these innovations with Dayforce Co-Pilot, we also delivered several key innovations to help our customers optimize their talent, manage compliance, drive productivity, and build great employee experiences. We delivered improved candidate and recruiting experiences within our talent products to enable faster and more efficient recruiting processes when they’re needed most. We launched Dayforce Alumni Management, a new product that helps organizations maintain strong relationships with their past employees who can become boomerang talent or even refer new talent to a business. We enhanced our leading workforce management products to support companies that have multi-locations, multi departments, in order to drive greater efficiencies through centralized and multi-week calendaring scheduling in a flash.

And finally, on compliance, which is job one for us here at Dayforce, we added more than 160 global compliance updates just in the first quarter. This includes enhanced year-end requirements, optimized reporting functionality, expanded data import capabilities, and complete updates to our tax rates to help our customers operate with confidence, a truly exciting start to the year for us and our customers. But now, let’s talk financials. Over to you Jeremy.

Jeremy Johnson: Thanks, Joe. We started 2024 strong, underpinned by healthy top line growth and continued profitability improvements. As David said, we exceeded guidance across all key revenue and profitability metrics. We delivered Dayforce recurring revenue of $337.2 million, growing 24%. And excluding float, Dayforce recurring revenue grew 23%, underpinned by strong go lives and healthy underlying customer trends. Total revenue of $431.5 million grew 16% on a GAAP basis and 17% on a constant currency basis, highlighting the continued convergence of Dayforce recurring revenue and total revenue growth rates, as 78% of our total revenue is Dayforce recurring revenue. Powerpay recurring revenue was $26 million, growing 8% including float, and 5% excluding float.

On a GAAP basis, gross profit was $205 million, up 28%, and operating profit was $41 million, up 6%, including a full quarter of the amortization of the Ceridian trade name, which is in G&A expenses at approximately $21 million. Cloud recurring gross margin was 79%, up 170 basis points versus last year. And excluding float, our cloud recurring gross margin also continued to expand nicely, improving by 170 basis points year-over-year. On a non-GAAP basis, adjusted cloud recurring gross margin was 80%, expanding 130 basis points year-over-year, as the Dayforce platform continues to scale. We view adjusted cloud recurring gross margins as a key metric that shows how much we make from an average dollar of recurring revenue after customers go live on the platform.

It’s a great comparison to our HCM peers in market, and it excludes non-cash items like depreciation, share-based compensation, as well as R&D-related costs. Adjusted EBITDA was $129.9 million, up 23% or a 30.1% margin, expanding 170 basis points year-over-year, and reflecting our continued improvement in gross profit margins and scale in adjusted G&A. From a cash flow perspective, operating cash flows were $9.1 million in Q1, $2 million lower than last year, primarily due to higher trade receivables. This was the result of timing specifically related to the change in our brand name as some customer payment cycles were delayed as a result of our name change to Dayforce. We remained confident in our full-year cash flow targets of upper 50% conversion from full-year adjusted EBITDA to operating cash flow.

As expected, Eloomi revenue added approximately 100 basis points of growth to our Dayforce recurring revenue in the first quarter. Looking ahead, for the full year, we now expect Dayforce recurring revenue ex-float of $1.163 billion to $1.168 billion, or growth of 21% as reported and on a constant currency basis, total revenue of $1.73 billion to $1.74 billion, or approximately 14% to 15% growth as reported and on a constant currency basis, adjusted EBITDA of $484 million to $499 million, or 28% to 28.7% margin. And float revenue is now expected to be $183 million for the full year, reflecting fewer rate cuts than originally anticipated. For the second quarter, we expect Dayforce recurring revenue ex-float of $276 million to $279 million, or growth in the range of 19% to 21% as reported, or 20% to 21% on a constant currency basis, total revenue of $414 million to $419 million, or growth of 13% to 15% as reported and on a constant currency basis.

And adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $108 million to $113 million, or a 26.1% to 27% margin. Float revenue is expected to be $47 million for the second quarter. As you recall, there are typically a handful of items that impact sequential growth between Q1 and Q2, including year-end print and filing revenue that drive Q1 higher, but don’t reoccur in Q2, and seasonal employee volumes that tend to fall off in Q2. This is reflected in our guidance. We have also updated the FX rate assumptions used for our guidance as the current spot rate of approximately $1.37 USD to CAD has worsened from the $1.33 level observed at the beginning of 2024. Before we go into Q&A, I want to remind investors and stakeholders that our financial reporting and accounting policies are underpinned by strong processes and procedures that undergo multiple layers of internal and external review.

We stand behind our financial reporting and accounting policies, which have been carefully considered, reviewed and audited, and transparently disclosed since becoming a public company in 2018. We encourage investors to review our financial statements, along with our past earnings calls, transcripts, and press releases for a comprehensive view of our financial profile, our accounting policies, and our viewpoint on key financial and operating metrics. Thank you for your continued support and conviction in Dayforce. We are excited for the future. With that, we can begin the Q&A portion of our call.

Erik Zimmer: Thanks, Jeremy. [Operator instructions. Our first question comes from Mark Marcon with Baird Mark.

Mark Marcon: Hey, good morning, everybody. Want to go – I’ve got two questions. One, the government of Canada, in their 2024 budget, they basically ended up committing $135 million CAD to improve public service human resources and pay systems. That’s up materially relative to the $52 million CAD that they had allocated during the prior year. And so, what I’m wondering is, first of all, it sounds like things are really progressing well. You had mentioned on the call that you don’t anticipate seeing a major step up until 2025. I know that there are some sensitivities in terms of what you can disclose, but it sounds like things are going really well, and I’m wondering if you can give us any additional perspective in terms of what the next milestones are, what we should be monitoring, because this is obviously a huge deal.

Steve Holdridge: Yes. Hey, Mark. This is Steve Holdridge. I’ll take that, and anyone’s welcome to jump in. Yes, as I said on the call, we view this as positive news, right? This is a statement of continued commitment. It is a budget expansion going into that. So, in terms of the macro, this further cements that. Keep in mind that this is a long-term program. It’s probably a minimum of two years before we even begin to see the first set of go lives. A big chunk of this is to continue the funding from prior years. Another big chunk of it goes to the government in terms of their labor and infrastructure, and then there’s a bunch of partners we have with it, but we do expect an uptick, a lot of it focused on the implementation and services sort of work. And then in early 2025, we’ll expect to see some increases in employee volumes there. So, overall positive, but part of a long journey.

Mark Marcon: Got it. And then as my follow up, Dayforce Co-Pilot, David, and Joe, you both sounded extremely excited about it. Joe, you mentioned that there’s simplified pricing around it. Wondering, can you give us any sense with regards to the incremental pricing and what the early customer feedback is and how you expect that to translate to upsells to the existing client base?

Joe Korngiebel: Mark, good to hear your voice and thank you for the question. Yes, Co-Pilot is a foundational, really transformation in how people use a people platform to be able to get answers and make more efficient and productive decisions for their employees. We started with an early design program, and we brought customers in early to start to vet out how the value could be realized. That early partnership work with our customers has transformed now into a charter program. We have our early customers leveraging it with their customers, uploading documents so they can see the answers that are oftentimes buried in different documents, as I mentioned, to be able to answer it so that it really takes the workload off of your HR admins and your staff.

It can really optimize the performance of your staff in terms of their ability to get answers done and get back to their job. For us, that is rolling out now. We’ll then go from that to general availability in the second half of this year. As I mentioned in my statements, we are simplifying the pricing. There’s a lot in the industry going around complex pricing of these type of generative AI tools. For us, it’s an add-on to any of our products within our HCM suite. And so, if you just buy one product or buy our full suite, you can add that on to get the productivity boost. And our customers are giving us feedback. That’s exactly what we’re on. We’re already seeing within our perspective, customers the same kind of interest, and it really moves us forward.

Mark Marcon: Can I sneak one more in? Jeremy, did you build anything in terms of recurring for this?

Jeremy Johnson: Mark, at this point, probably not incrementally in. I think we’re testing out the use cases. We’re building this up with customer base, and probably not incrementally at this point.

Mark Marcon: Great. Thank you very much.

Erik Zimmer: Our next question comes from Kevin McVeigh from UBS. Kevin. Kevin, you may unmute your line. Kevin?

Kevin McVeigh: Great. Thanks so much. Can you hear me?

Erik Zimmer: Yep.

Kevin McVeigh: Hey, congratulations on the results. I think you’d reference kind of the SI-led sales growth in the quarter was about 35%. Give us an update on where that is in terms of some of the transition from professional services on the professional services side to the SIs and how that sales distribution channel’s going forward, because that seems like part of the story that’s starting to kind of scale.

David Ossip: Yes, and I think we’ve been consistent in that over the past few years. We’ve seen steady growth in that. We’ve also been very public that our strategy is to move to primarily an SI-led ecosystem, even broader than SIs, right, advisory partners, partners with PE. We continue to see strength on that, both with the large global systems integrators, where we continue to see expansion, as well as the number of regional mid-market. We expect for the balance of the year, the growth in SIs to outpace even our growth of bookings, and we expect to see penetration across all markets. We have high penetrations in EMEA and APJ where we haven’t built up the sort of services capabilities. What’s that allowed us in the US to do is focus our services on new and emerging products and really supporting SIs with technology and product-specific capability.

Kevin McVeigh: Very helpful. And then just with the uptick in float, any change philosophically as to how we should think about just whether that gets redeployed or kind of just any impact, because obviously that seems like somewhat unexpected given where rates are, but just remind us of how we’re thinking about that incremental float benefit.

David Ossip: Yes, thanks, Kevin. It’s obviously a nice surprise that float is going to stick around a little bit longer here. We will continue to look for opportunities to invest. There’s a significant amount of growth that we can go after. We’ve got a bunch that we can do on the product side of things. But at the same time, we know we have margin targets and free cash flow targets that we want to hit. So, you’ll probably see us take a balanced approach here with the float.

Kevin McVeigh: Thank you so much.

Erik Zimmer: Our next question comes from Raimo Lenschow from Barclays. Raimo?

Raimo Lenschow: Yes, can you hear me okay?

Erik Zimmer: Yes.

Raimo Lenschow: Good. Perfect. Hey, can I just double click a little bit what you’re seeing out there in the economy, like in terms of interest on starting new projects. You obviously have a long list of new clients that you announced, which is really good to see. But what’s the overall appetite in terms of thinking about digital transformation in the HCM space, and how much is AI kind of a talking point? You kind of opened doors for that one. And then I have one follow-up for Jeremy.

David Ossip: Sure. Hey, Raimo, good to speak with you. Hey, Raimo, just check your math on your early report as well in terms of the guide. We actually pushed the full amount to the full year, not half of it. So, just a correction in your note. In terms of your question, if we look at the actual pipeline, the pipeline levels remain very healthy and robust. What we’re seeing in the industry is that there is a focus on increased automation, and the way that typically translates is that we would come in and we often see a simplification of 12 systems to about one. And as we simplify the environment for the client, it means that you have more automation, less integration, less manual effort, less manual errors, less FTEs, higher efficiencies, and that messaging is resonating very well in today’s economy, and I think it’s reflected in the numbers and the accounts that Steve spoke about.

Raimo Lenschow: Good. Perfect. Thank you. And then, Jeremy, you talked a little bit about that that extra of flow revenue coming in there. Can you talk a little bit about some of the priorities that you – if you think about balancing it out, some of the priorities in terms of kind of maybe giving us more versus kind of investing more, like where would that be? Thank you and congrats for me as well, and I’ll look into that, David.

Jeremy Johnson: Yes, thanks, Raimo. I think when we talk about getting incremental float dollars, that either could flow right down to the bottom line, or we can choose to reinvest those funds. There is, as I mentioned, kind of a lot of room to grow in this business. We’re talking about our ability to go global. We’re talking about expanding across the HCM space and launching new products and investing in things like AI. So, I look at it really as how much do we put into sales, marketing to continue growth, and how much do we put into product and technology versus taking to the bottom line? And I do think that our opportunity is huge out there. As you heard us talk to, the HCM market is a really big one with a huge TAM that’s growing nicely.