The challenge: Payroll that took “hours and hours.”

The Chocolate Dispensary isn’t Kala’s first foray into running her own business. It carries elements of her previous accomplishments—like her time spent organising tasting events and working with wineries. She saw The Chocolate Dispensary as “the chocolate version of a boutique winery,” and that helped shape her initial vision of the store as it launched.

Over time, that vision shifted with her customers' wants and needs. They added a cafe to their retail shop, offering pour-over coffee and (award-winning) drinking chocolate to the menu. As Kala built relationships with new vendors and chocolatiers around the globe, she offered more of their goods in their retail shop. As the shop grew, so did her team, which currently sits around 15 employees, all with the shared goal of shining a spotlight on independent chocolate makers.

“When you buy a bar of craft chocolate and you know who made it, your money is going to a real person,” Kala says. “I met the guy who made the chocolate in my cup right now, for example. So when you think about shopping this year, we always say: Shop small, whenever possible. It matters so much.”

Soon enough, the unavoidable duties that came with being a founder started to brush up against the tools and strategies she had been using to do her daily tasks. And especially given the unusually-volatile price of cacao in recent years, Kala’s time could be measured in dollars and cents.

“Cacao is a commodity traded on the world market,” says Kala. “Its costs have fluctuated from about $2,500 per metric ton to $12,000 a metric ton in 2024. Now it’s down to between $5,000 and $10,000 depending on the day you look. And like everything else, it’s subject to ridiculous tariffs.”

This pressure was multiplied by the fact that no two days are ever the same at The Chocolate Dispensary—but they’re all equally jam-packed.

“Usually, I’m in the store six days a week,” she says. “So that means I’m alternating between serving customers, ordering inventory, calling a plumber, dropping off a rent check, figuring out how we’re going to afford our insurance that just got four times more expensive, talking to my assistant about all our social media, and doing events!”

“Each day is…very different,” Kala concludes. “But I can’t think of any small business owner who doesn’t [wear this many hats],” Kala says the key is prioritizing each task correctly and spending time where it matters most.

Every day brought a new list of things to prioritise and solve, but Kala noticed that she was spending more time struggling with her original suite of tools. While some of them (like Gmail and Last Pass) served Kala and Dale just fine as their team grew to around 12 employees and their list of vendors went from double to triple digits within 18 months, others started to buckle under their growth.

They switched from Omnisend to Klaviyo as their marketing needs increased, and experimented with Toast as their POS system before shifting back to Shopify. But Kala saw that she was losing the most time (and gaining the most frustration) with their payroll app becoming a source of constant struggle.

“It was the worst thing in the world,” says Kala. “[Running payroll] took me hours and hours, and a ton of clicks, and none of it made any sense.” Her need was simple, but important: Finding a way to run payroll that didn’t lead to lost time and emotional stress.

Within six months, The Chocolate Dispensary was using Homebase for scheduling and payroll. It gave Kala her time back so she could keep investing it elsewhere.

The solution: Eliminating the “Frustration Tax.”

For both Kala and Dale, change has been a constant throughout their lives and careers.

“Dale literally says: ‘In every new job, I didn’t know what I was doing,’” says Kala. “And that’s sort of what my life has been, too. At a certain point, you stop flagellating yourself and say: Okay, that was a f**k up. What can I learn? And then you move on.”

That core ethos of quickly identifying the problem, pivoting, and moving forward brought Kala to Homebase. She knew her current approach to running payroll was costing her time, money, and frustration every day. And she knew exactly where she would prefer to spend that time and energy—The Chocolate Dispensary and its customers.

“I can say without a doubt that having Homebase simplified my life greatly,” says Kala when comparing it to her previous payroll tool. “Homebase saves me frustration. That is as important to me as numbers. The fact that I’m not wasting time being angry and frustrated is worth so much to me.”

Call it the Frustration Tax. The time owners and managers spend fighting with the tools they need to run their business instead of running the business. It’s the hours spent learning the quirks and tricks of a new app or piece of software, and the days lost to troubleshooting, Googling, and calling up customer service.

Kala was paying that Frustration Tax every day with her previous payroll tools. She was also using Google Sheets for her scheduling—another area where Homebase cut down on hours of copy-pasted tables and documents. Every minute saved allows Kala and Dale to focus more on actually growing and enjoying the business, and connecting with new chocolatiers so The Chocolate Dispensary can share their creations with as wide an audience as possible.

The impact: Time freed to spotlight independent chocolatiers.

Today, Kala runs her payroll every other week through Homebase. What once took hours is now done in a few minutes, and what used to be catalogued and combined separately is now organized automatically. With her entire team clocking in and communicating via Homebase, she doesn’t have to chase down time cards or cross-reference spreadsheets.

For Kala, the best thing a tool can be is invisible, frictionless, and helpful at doing what it’s supposed to do.

“A thing that I’ve learned with age is: When you learn what you can’t do, or what makes you feel like you want to die inside,” says Kala. “Find someone who is happy to get paid to do that, and let them [take over]. The fact that I have a positive interaction with Homebase is money to me. That’s money and that’s time, because I’m not wasting it on being angry and frustrated. My metric [of value] is an emotional metric.”

Beyond the emotional metric of relieving Kala’s Frustration Tax, there’s the simple fact that The Chocolate Dispensary’s main product is a valuable product that’s been especially vulnerable to recent changes in tariffs and shipping rates.

Currently, The Chocolate Dispensary offers close to 1000 types of chocolate created by over 100 different vendors from around the world. Tracking the ups and downs of importing goods at that scale could be a full-time job in and of itself. Now, Kala can focus on those important vendor relationships and balancing the budget, while Homebase keeps scheduling, time tracking, and payroll running smoothly in the background. 

“Shopping small matters so much.”

For Kala and Dale, every minute and dollar saved from the Frustration Tax by payroll and scheduling tools that eliminate friction from their workflow can be invested back into The Chocolate Dispensary’s chocolatiers and customers.

In that sense, Kala exists as an advocate and a spotlight for every small chocolate vendor featured at The Chocolate Dispensary. She takes that responsibility seriously, working hard to educate and build bridges with new customers—and hopefully turn them into lifelong fans of craft chocolate along the way.

“Spending a little bit extra on your wine, on your coffee, on your bread? These are all things that people are toiling their whole lives to make—like turning cacao pods into beautiful chocolate,” says Kala. “It’s not just candy; chocolate is a food that warriors used to drink to go into battle! They would drink a cup of cacao, and it would last them all day.”

“This is a food. It’s a fruit. It’s gorgeous, and beautiful, and magical, and intimate—I’ve seen it change people, literally. I’ve seen people cry, laugh, and change their whole traditions because they tasted real craft chocolate,” says Kala. “And that’s the way that small businesses can affect your life.”

As the end of that supply chain, Kala and Dale strive to spread the word and do right by their vendors—because for some of them, The Chocolate Dispensary is the only place their goods are sold in the entire country.

“I have brands that would not be on shelves without me, and people would not know about them,” says Kala. “When people buy craft chocolate from here, they’re also absorbing the stories of these people. They’re not just buying the flavor—although the flavor is great—they’re buying these people’s livelihoods, and taking it into their own lives.”

That’s a goal worth focusing on.

The right payroll process ensures that your team gets paid in full and on time, and your books are balanced at the end of each month. Less time spent crunching numbers and smoothing out spreadsheets means more time devoted towards building and growing the business you were passionate enough to create in the first place.

If you want to copy Kala’s recipe for success and minimize your daily Frustration Tax, Homebase has everything you need to take your payroll to the next level.