Our Story
StarGarden started in 1984 in Vancouver as Pathfinder, a custom software shop that took on projects of every kind. One of those projects set the course for everything since: an HR and payroll system for the BC Ministry of Labour. They needed something almost nothing on the market could do, running payroll across multiple unions and employee groups from a single, position-centric design. We built it, and we found our calling in it.
That one decision, to organize the system around positions rather than patching around them, became the foundation we still build on today. More than 40 years later, the same idea drives the platform: handle real workforce complexity at the core, so the organizations that rely on us can manage HR and payroll with accuracy, flexibility, and control. We are still based in Vancouver, and still building for the same kind of hard problem that started it all.
What drives us
We exist to make hard things manageable. The organizations we serve work in some of the most demanding environments out there: unionized workplaces, intricate pay and benefits rules, layered compliance, and teams that stretch across provinces and borders. Most software treats that as an edge case. We treat it as the job.
You will find StarGarden behind the scenes in local government, healthcare, education, heavy industry, and manufacturing, wherever payroll has to be right the first time. And our promise has not changed since day one: dependable software, backed by people who answer when you need them. We measure ourselves less by features shipped and more by whether your team spends less time wrestling with process and more time supporting the people behind it.