Asure Software Inc

Good afternoon and welcome to Assure's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. Joining us for today's call are Chairman and CEO Pat Geppel, Chief Financial Officer John Pence, and Vice President of Investor Relations Patrick McKillop. Following the prepared remarks will be a question and answer session for the analysts and investors. I'd now like to turn the call over to Patrick McKillop for introductory remarks. Patrick, please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Assure's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings results call. Following the close of the markets, we released our financial results. The earnings release is available on the SEC's website and our investor relations website at investor.assuresoftware.com, where you can also find the investor presentation. During our call today, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe to be useful to investors and exclude the impact of certain items. A description and timing of these items along with the reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release. Today's call will also contain forward-looking statements that refer to future events and as such involve some risks. We use words such as expects, believes, and may to indicate forward-looking statements. And we encourage you to review our filings with the SEC for additional information on factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. I will hand the call over to Pat in a moment, but just wanted to take a moment to remind folks of some upcoming investor relations activities. On March 16th through the 18th, we will attend the 37th Annual Roth Conference in Dana Point, California. We also plan to do some non-deal road shows later this spring as well. Investor outreach is very important to Usher, and I would like to thank all those that assist us in efforts to connect with investors. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded, and it will be available for a replay via a link on the investor relations section of our website. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Pat Kevel, Chairman and CEO. Pat?

Thank you, Patrick, and welcome, everyone, to Assure Software's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings results call. I am joined on this call by our CFO, John Petz, and we will provide a business update for our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results, as well as our outlook for 2025. Following our remarks, we'll be available to answer your questions. As you can see from our reported results, we executed quite well against the plan we laid out for 2024 and delivered strong results. Our total revenue increased modestly in 2024 to $119.8 million, excluding ERTC revenues. Total revenues were up 17%. Our recurring revenues for the full year, 2024, grew 15% versus the prior year. And I would like to highlight that our recurring revenues, which carry higher value than one-time revenues, as a percentage of total revenues, increased to 96% versus 84% in 2023. During 2024, we focused on the continued growth of our business and replacing one-time ERTC revenues with higher value reoccurring revenues through accommodation of organic growth and acquisition. The drivers of our success in 2024 were broad-based with a strong contribution by our payroll tax management product as well as contributions from recent acquisition. Over the past year, we added to our product portfolio with items such as employee recruiting technology, benefit brokerage capabilities, pre-tax and preventative healthcare solutions, and our 401 offering. Recently, we launched AssurePay. This is an innovative alternative to online banking, which we expect to help employers with retention, reduction in lost paper checks, and attract new employees. It provides employers with the ability to offer on-demand pay, as also known as earned wage access. AssurePay is delivered via easy-to-use mobile app and offers debit card capabilities, free ATM withdrawals, Plus more, we're in the early stages of the product rollout with launches to strategic groups thus far. We made great strides with our acquisition strategy during 2024, primarily acquiring our payroll resellers. Under this approach, we're acquiring new clients, and such transactions are not so much acquisitions in the traditional definition. We anticipated an acquisition during the fourth quarter, which did not materialize. However, in the first quarter, we replaced the value of the deal with two additional acquisitions and our pipeline for future deals remains robust. These client acquisitions can be efficiently integrated into our existing business and we can cross sell additional capabilities which we believe will drive future profitability as we achieve scale. As we continue our efforts to enhance client experience, we've been working to integrate all Assure solutions in a common modern user interface. Additionally, we recently introduced Luna, the industry's first AI agent for payroll and HR. Unlike traditional generative AI chatbots, Luna is an advanced AI agent that understands Azure's suite of products, and more importantly, can act on behalf of both employees through self-service and business owners and administrators. Employees can simply ask Luna for help, and she can take care of items like updating personal details, changing benefits, elections, and more. Recently, we've experienced momentum with new payroll units increasing at a strong rate during the fourth quarter, and that sets us up nicely for 2025. Also, our 401K product had a strong business results in the fourth quarter, as we look forward to seeing that trend continue during 2025. As you know, our 401K offering leverages the U.S. Government Secure 2.0 Act, which provides funding and encourages adoption of the 401K plans by businesses in the U.S. Our sales efforts during the year 2024 resulted in an 86% increase in new bookings versus the prior year. Also, our contracted backlog is strong. It has grown 17% since our third quarter earnings report. Based on our current business trends, we are reiterating our 2025 revenue guidance of $134 to $138 million, with EBITDA margins of between 23% and 24%. As a reminder, this 2025 guidance excludes any contributions from future potential acquisitions. As we look at the business plan for 2025, our guidance implies a mid-teens growth rate, which is very positive. Finally, we're excited to share that we signed a multi-year agreement with a firm that is the industry leader in audit, tax, consulting, and advisory services to resell our payroll and payroll tax management solutions. This agreement will enable the firm to deliver our comprehensive solutions to their firm's clients for the first time. Now, I'd like to hand off to John to discuss our financial results in more detail, as well as our Quarter 1 guidance. John?