About Pay Memo
Built by a small team at KNH Advisers for clear, defensible documentation.
KNH Advisers began in 2022 with a simple mission: make high-quality guidance accessible to individuals and small businesses, without the pressure that comes from traditional billable-hour models.
We deliberately run a flat-fee and value-based model instead of a time-and-materials model. In too many firms, a quick call starts the billable timer and turns into a surprise invoice later. We believe clients should be able to ask important questions without that friction.
That model only works if your delivery systems are efficient. We invested early in technology, automation, and standardized workflows so work that used to take hours can be completed in minutes without losing quality.
We are a small office of fewer than 10 people, led by Katie, and Pay Memo reflects systems our team built from that mindset. Those efficiencies let us focus on higher-value work for our clients, like business strategy, helping grow their teams through key hiring decisions and earnings support analysis, while still documenting compensation decisions for business owners in a clear, defensible format.
- Founded in 2022
- Flat-fee and value-based billing model
- Built from internal tooling that saved thousands of hours
- Focused on clean, standardized, defensible outputs
Owned and operated by KNH Advisers
Why we created Pay Memo
Pay Memo started as an internal tool to produce defensible compensation documentation faster and more consistently without sacrificing quality.
As we worked with local attorneys on earnings support analysis and helped clients with key hiring decisions, we saw the same problem repeatedly: the decision itself was only half the work, and documentation quality determined whether the result held up later.
Pay Memo is designed for that gap. It turns high-value advisory judgment into clean, consistent documentation that can be reviewed, shared, and repeated across matters and teams.
Our approach to data
Most teams already know the pay number or range they plan to offer. The time-consuming part is documenting and supporting that decision in a way others can review and trust.
That is exactly where Pay Memo comes in. We optimize for defensibility first and use government-backed data because it is broadly recognized, easy to cite, and one of the most practical and affordable ways to support compensation documentation.
If your priority is premium proprietary datasets for specialized executive compensation, Pay Memo may not be the best fit. For standardized, explainable documentation workflows, it is.
Who Pay Memo is for (and who it isn't)
Pay Memo is a strong fit if you care about:
- Defensible documentation
- Clean, standardized workpapers
- Speed and repeatability
- Transparent logic you can explain
Pay Memo is not designed to be a specialized executive compensation platform. If executive comp benchmarking is your core need, you will likely be better served by specialized executive comp tools.
We'd love your feedback
We built Pay Memo to save real time and improve consistency. If it helps your workflow, we would genuinely love to hear what changed for you, whether that is hours saved, smoother reviews, or better client communication.
Pay Memo is the first of several tools built from the same KNH mindset, and we plan to share more over time.