Global payroll today: Local solutions, central visibility

Global payroll will always have an element of the local and centralized, or at least it should!

Modern day multi-country global payroll services, delivery and management is complex and nuanced, visibility and control are currently being hindered by a complex network of disparate systems, disconnected dataflows, non-standardized data formats and a lack of automation.

This makes it very difficult for a centralized team to really see what is happening across all of the individual countries, and somehow get a consolidated global view of what is happening for bigger picture insights, trends, and anomalies.

In this article we are going to look at why global payroll processes should be a mix of locally based solutions, with a technology platform that enables centralized visibility.

Local solutions will always be required

There is sometimes a misconception out there that international payroll can be delivered with some magic bullet solution that involves it all being processed via the touch of a single button. But there will always be a need for local country expertise because every country is different, and payroll is essentially local. You have local taxes, local benefits, regional pay elements and deductions and so on. This would simply be too much information and data for a multinational company to manage on their own without the help of local expertise. So, there will always be a need to work with local payroll country providers during payroll operations.

Local country providers need to be engaged with and managed to ensure that the employees on the ground in these countries get paid accurately and on time. Nobody really has an issue with this, where things get complicated is when a company recruits heavily and grows their employee base to a significant number spread out across a lot of different countries. This creates a need to engage with a larger number of local country providers, making visibility and control a lot harder. These providers operate with their own technology systems and data formats and there is rarely a way for them to flow the payroll data they are working with into some kind of centralized system at head office.

The local solutions will always be needed when it comes to global payroll management, this is not the issue, the issue is managing them all in such a way that provides insight, clarity and control to a centralized payroll system that enables a multinational company to consolidate their global payroll data and real-time reporting ?into a single location for analysis and insight.

A consistent methodology

If you are a large multinational organization with a mandate to grow and a recruitment plan in place, then you already know that your global payroll delivery and management is about to become more complex. More people to be paid means more data to be managed and more local country vendors to be engaged with, local labor laws, regulation and compliance responsibilities follow. A consistent methodology for global payroll delivery and management can really help in situations like this-what we are talking about here is a globally standardized process which results in a single way of working across all of your payroll countries.

What this looks like in practice is standardized data, data in the same formats regardless of country, time zone or currency. This lends itself to excellence in global payroll delivery and smoother operational efficiency on both a local and global level. If the process is the same across countries, then global payroll teams and professionals are operating with the same process and the same data, everything becomes streamlined, faster, easier, and more efficient. By having such a standardized process in place, it would also be easier to gain insights into your payroll delivery which could tell you if there are any areas that need attention or if specific work locations are costing the company too much and need to be managed. This kind of useful financial information can only be accessed if the payroll process has been standardized and made available in a single location and payroll platform.

Data and process standardization are the solution to finding a happy medium between the need for a localized solution as well as the need for an ability to centrally manage it all in one location and consolidate these countries for visibility and control.

Control and scalability

When you have a number of local solutions in place, and you package it all with standardized data and processes, then you have the ability to manage the local solutions in a streamlined and standardized way, while also facilitating the flow of data into a centralized processing system. With this in place, you have laid the foundations for process duplication. So, as you grow in scale and move into new countries and territories, you have a global payroll model and process that supports and facilitates rapid scaling.

You will also have in place a technology platform capable of keeping pace with the growth ambitions of the company. Without the technology platform and standardized data and processes, your global payroll function could well become a blocker or choke point to the kind of growth you wish to achieve. When you can manage local country providers and solutions in a centralized way with visibility and control, then you have the kind of scalability you are looking for.

As well as this, by implementing an automation technology platform that can automate all of your data flows, you are also saving time by removing the need to enter all of the data in manually-this also eliminates the high risk of data entry mistakes being made. By having this kind of technology in place, then companies can gain all of the information and payroll data that they need in a faster and more efficient way, knowing that the automation technology has helped ensure no mistakes are being made and saved time, which all helps contribute to the desired business growth and scaling objectives of the company.

Global payroll can certainly be complex and difficult to manage, but there are things you can do to make it significantly easier to control. By ensuring that you work with the local country payroll provider but have a process for centralizing all the necessary information on a single platform, that supports and implements standardization, can all help with the simplification of your global payroll. Not only this, but by centralizing and standardizing all of this data, you can then gain valuable insights and important analysis of the data, which leads to informed decision making.?

This article originally appeared on payslip.com