Paychex, Inc. (NASDAQ:PAYX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 7 of 17

Jared Levine: It’s actually Jared Levine for Bryan today. How does the 3Q PEO revenue and worksite employees come in relative to your expectations? And then what is the expectation for 4Q in terms of how worksite employees and at-risk health insurance revenue will compare to 3Q?

Efrain Rivera: Yes. Jared, I won’t get into that level of granularity at this point. And — so we will report as we get through the quarter and year-end, I’m not ready to dive into specific operational metrics for the PEO at this point. We called out that revenue was going to be lower in Q4. That’s a function of the topics that we’ve been talking about relative to insurance. But yes, I won’t go any further than that. We’ll have more to say as we get to Q4.

Jared Levine: Okay. And then the 25 to 50 basis points of potential margin expansion for FY 24, can you discuss what the primary drivers of that expansion would be?

Efrain Rivera: Yes. I mean it’s a — it’s an emphasis that the Company has had. We’re going through the budget process, frankly, after this call, we’ve done, we’ll start the process of putting our budget together. But — we just have a mantra to get more efficient where we can get more efficient. And some of it comes from operations. Some of it comes from sales. Some of it comes from G&A. It’s really across the business and where we see an opportunity to become more efficient. Not simply massivley just cut costs, obviously, that’s important, but also deploy technology where appropriate, to become better at doing what we’re doing. We do it. I would say that many of the technologies that you read about in that here, we don’t trump it, but we use.

And we think that advances in things like AI can be of tremendous help to tech angle services businesses. So we’re excited about the potential, to understand the risk and are actively looking at how we can deploy those technologies to get more efficient, get better at serving the clients.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Kupferberg with Bank of America.

Jason Kupferberg: So I guess there’s a school of thought out there that just one of the byproducts of the banking crisis could be some tightening of credit, small businesses find it harder to get loans. They tend to bank with a lot of the regionals, et cetera. I’m just wondering what your take is on that as we start to look into fiscal ’24. It doesn’t sound like you guys are really assuming a recession per se in this preliminary outlook for next year. So, I just want to get a reaction to that to start.

John Gibson: Yes, Jason, I think I kind of mentioned it in my remarks and some other questions. I don’t think there’s any doubt. I mean, prime at 8% for small and midsize business centers and you talk to a regional bank that I’ve heard, and there’s going to be some tightening of credit. That’s part of the reason why we’ve seen a lot of our customers engaging us on our ERTC product. So it was interesting, I would say as we approach some of our clients, some of our clients like, I really don’t need that. A lot of our clients don’t — again, we’re Main Street small business owners. They’re not — they’re not looking for a handout and they’re probably sometimes a little gun shy to get out — there’s been a lot of talk about auditing this stuff.

Page 7 of 17