Multinational companies everywhere are now considering their current technology stack against the backdrop of challenges brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. Everything has changed in the last year and a half and there is now a lot of focus on ways to better leverage technology in order to ensure the smooth continuation of delivery of a range of business-critical services.
Last year, business continuity procedures were swiftly bought into practice and the success or failure of these procedures was largely dependent on the amount of time, effort and investment that was put into creating them in the first place. Let's face it, nobody expected to really have to use them on this level -nobody could possibly have anticipated that over 90% of an organization's workforce would be forced to work remotely for an undefined period of time.
Remote delivery of business-critical services looks to be here to stay -and regardless of what happens in the future, a full return to the old way of delivering things seems unlikely. Business leaders, in response to this, have begun thinking about innovation in a more structured way. Now they are giving innovation more serious thought as it is clear things are unlikely to go back to the way they were. So, this might be the right time to have a brief recap of what innovation in global payroll looks like and what are the features of innovative technology that multinational organizations should be considering to better manage and deliver their multi country global payroll.
1. Consolidated Data
First up is consolidated data -this is really about taking a data first approach to all sensitive global payroll data and information and making the important decision to locate it on a single platform. This is a really intelligent move as global payroll data being housed in a single location (ideally in a secure cloud environment) will go a long way to putting organization and structure around the complex multi-vendor/payroll provider environment that many companies operate with today. If you can get all of your global payroll data, all of your payroll vendors and all of your payroll professionals operating from a single platform- then you get some immediate visibility and control around payroll processing -both global payroll managers and business leaders are in a much stronger position to view, manage and control global payroll operations
2. Standardization
Next stop is the standardization of this payroll data -after you have gone to all the trouble of consolidating on to a single digital platform- the next logical step is to ensure that all of the data in this platform is converted into a standardized, recognizable and user-friendly format. By doing this, global payroll professionals across your organization will be operating with similar data across all of their payroll countries and this makes data workflows easier to process and manage and allows for the duplication of processes across countries. Again, standardization goes a long way to reducing much of the complexity associated with multi country global payroll services. The ideal scenario for a global payroll manager is to have the internal global payroll team and the external payroll providers operating with the same data and payroll processes. This is innovation in practice and results in faster global payroll delivery, professionals and providers in sync and common format data from which important reporting and analytics can be extracted.
3. Automation
Next up is automation, specifically the introduction of robotic process automation to ensure that recurring and repeatable data capture, entry and validation is automated where possible. In 2021, asking experienced global payroll professionals to manually enter sensitive global payroll data into spreadsheets and share it via email his neither secure nor sustainable. Implementing new technology that automates can transform payroll departments.
Digital platforms with automated processes should be in place to ensure that time consuming manual entries are a thing of the past in global payroll departments around the world. Automation immediately adds security to the data, which subsequently enhances compliance- digital audit trails can provide proof of where payroll data was entered, who had access to it, who interacted with it and the reasons why. It also significantly reduces or eliminates entirely the risk of human error in global payroll data input - machines do not get tired and can bulk upload thousands of payroll data entries in seconds.
Global payroll professionals are then free to spend their time working on high priority work - this brings us on to the next piece of innovation - advanced reporting and analytics extracted via smart digital tools.
4. Reporting
At companies around the world today, you will likely find that there exists a huge amount of informative, insightful and actionable business data with global payroll -but it is not easily accessible. Non standardized data, manual input practices and legacy technology have combined to make it very difficult to extract this hugely valuable data in digestible reporting formats.
This is a hugely unsatisfactory situation that can be avoided by operating global payroll delivery from a digitized platform that features smart reporting tools and analytics. Multi country global payroll has become more complex in recent years and there is therefore a greater need for more nuanced and comprehensive reporting - a range of different stakeholders need the ability to drill down into specific pay elements and metrics in real-time to find out about the true cost of employing an individual.
Reporting that delivers transparent labor costs in a way that can compare different countries against each other is in high demand these days-CFOs, financial operations managers and other stakeholders need these figures to plan and budget as well as strategize. There is an increased recognition of the importance of global payroll data when it comes to making strategic decisions about scaling into new markets and deciding which country represents the best value in terms of managing labor costs.
These four features of innovative global payroll technology are very much connected- consolidating all global payroll data onto a single platform is where it all begins -this is the data first approach that creates the foundation for standardization. Standardization of data in turn allows for the introduction of automation processes -once the data is standardized and all of the interconnected data flows are documented -it becomes easier to see where automation can be introduced across end-to-end payroll processing.
Finally, with standardized data in a single location and global payroll operations processes automated where possible, you are left with the ideal circumstances to extract relevant, usable and insightful reporting and analytics. This is a picture of how digital platforms and global payroll technology can lead to the kind of innovation that global payroll managers and payroll professionals at multinational companies are stating with alarming regularity that they need. The presence of high-volume data, multiple disparate systems and complex multivendor networks means that this kind of innovation has become a necessity when it comes to managing global payroll operations in a way that is both effective and innovative.
The Payslip platform offers global business employers the opportunity to implement all four of these features via a single integration. Delivering global payroll across several different countries is so much easier when companies choose to connect with our automation and integration platform.
We start by moving your global payroll data to a single manageable location - we offer your management team a single dashboard view of all global payroll countries so they can see exactly what is happening. We standardize the data across all countries and introduce automation wherever it is feasible to do so - processes immediately become smarter, faster and more efficient.
We enable self-service global payroll reporting - all relevant stakeholders in your organization can be given authorized access to the platform so that they can pull and run their own reporting on a self-serve basis. This means that payroll professionals access reports for important analysis, company employees access their payroll data and information whenever they want, and business leaders run detailed and specific reporting on the global payroll financial data points that interest them the most or add strategic value.
This is global payroll innovation in practice -you can be up and running on our platform a lot quicker than you might think -talk to our team today.