Global payroll professionals tend to be extremely dedicated people who display great passion and enthusiasm when it comes to ensuring that employees at multinationals around the world are paid accurately and on time. They often deserve higher praise and larger profiles than they receive, and it has been interesting to note that the recent global pandemic has served to highlight the business-critical nature of their work.
All they really ask for, is the right level of support within the global payroll department- this level of support is needed in the form of recognition when it comes to some of the key challenges in the global payroll landscape together with realistic solutions to these challenges.
It takes less than you might think to empower them, and there is huge value to be gained from a global payroll team that can realize their potential and focus their tremendous work ethic into the parts of their job that add genuine business value, not only to employees who wish to be paid on time, but also to the wider business as a whole.
In this article, we will examine some of the difficulties that global payroll professional face on a daily basis, what needs to be done to help them with these challenges and how much better the delivery of global payroll can become with some investment in innovative digital tools.
Process issues
Most people accept that it can be a demanding and pressurized role - employees at a multinational company demand to be paid accurately and on time and tend to display little tolerance when it comes to errors. Errors are rare and this is testament to the ongoing commitment and diligence displayed by global payroll professionals everywhere.
These professionals also face a range of payroll processing issues that slow them down and make their jobs harder to do. Like a lot of departments, even small improvements could make a significant difference to how things are done. Speed, efficiency and streamlining of processes is always to be welcomed and anything that can solve problems, many of which have become unnecessary in this day and age, makes solid business sense while also being a positive factor in employee retention. Let's take a look at some of these global payroll issues and the reasons why they exist.
Manual entry
Even in 2020, manual inputs and manual validations play a far bigger role in the delivery of global payroll than they should. It has reached unacceptable limits.
Non-standard data
Global payroll is complex and if data is coming from different countries in different formats, it is not hard to see why this could be a problem.
Emails and spreadsheets
It may be hard to completely eliminate these from office life, but they are not really sustainable, and they come with major information security risks, particularly when you consider the sensitive nature of global payroll data.
Compliance
How do I know I'm compliant in a certain country? An uncomfortable reality today is that very few global payroll managers can answer this question with confidence when they are running multi country payrolls for a large multinational.
Remote access to data
Now that we're all living with the effects of the coronavirus and delivering many services remotely, accessing data from a non-office environment has become crucial and mission critical. Bizarrely, not all global payroll professionals can do this.
Volume of work
Companies are scaling at a rate faster than ever before- for global payroll professionals, this means new countries, new regions, new currencies and time zones as well as a larger number of employees to pay each month.
Legacy technology
A lot of technology used to process global payroll is no longer fit for purpose because it simply wasn't designed to handle the big data and multi country complexity in operation today.
Governance
Many working in global payroll feel that they lack control and visibility over who is doing what with each payroll country.
Low profile
Global payroll departments never seem to top the queue when it comes to investment in technology or services that could improve the delivery of global payroll. Technology and processes have stagnated or lag behind when it comes to digital innovation and it is proving costly.
Untapped potential
What all of this means is that global payroll professionals tend to spend way too much of their time putting out fires instead of focusing on analysis and service improvement. Many of these professionals have decades of experience and there is real potential within them to deliver value on a wider scale. This value cannot be released while they are faced with manual inputs, slow cumbersome technology and dated methodologies.
Leadership teams are also missing out because global payroll data can be extremely informative if used in the right way. But there is no right way if the data cannot first be extracted and produced in a digestible, clearly understandable format. Powerful trends and cost analysis is there waiting to be mined but due to the nature of a lot of global payroll reporting, this data tends to remain buried under complex processes or layers of technology that are not capable of bringing it to the surface. Leadership teams looking for crucial data to help them provide a solid strategic direction for a multinational could really benefit from this data and they're missing out not being able to get it in a fast and efficient manner.
This is really about untapped potential - the potential of global payroll professionals to do more in a smarter, faster and better way. And the potential of global payroll data to deliver key business insights and actionable conclusions.
The digital solution
A huge amount of this can be solved via a digital transformation project and focusing some much-needed investment into the technology currently in place within the global payroll department. A technology platform together with a range of innovative tools can genuinely transform global payroll into a flexible, efficient and streamlined department that is connected to the wider IT ecosystem of the multinational, in particular the HR and finance functions.
So how might a digital transformation solve these issues -well, it can:
- automate manual and repeat processes - releasing people from the burden of constantly inputting validating and checking it.
- standardize data processes and workflows so that professionals in different countries are working in the same way with the same kind of data
- empower global payroll professionals with digital tools such as digital calendars
- release actionable insight and key data via detailed, comprehensive and global level reporting and analysis
- develop a scalable process for the delivery of global payroll so that multinationals can scale quickly with a process that can be repeated across countries
- introduce integration between key players in the IT ecosystem -payroll, HR, finance, procurement and IT
- allow for centralized management and visibility over global payroll operations
- help form a global framework across the wider business for compliance, data security, governance and controls
Payslip
We have been speaking with global payroll professionals for many years now and are aware of the challenges they face -in fact, much of our technology was designed and purpose built to solve these specific challenges. Our software automates repeatable processes and standardizes data and workflows so two of the biggest issues are immediately reduced or even eliminated.
This way, our platform gives payroll professionals back some much-needed time and allows them to focus on customizing and consolidating global payroll reports, enabling them to focus on the data and what it is revealing. They can also access payroll data remotely and switch tasks amongst team members in different countries.
They keep track of everything with a digital calendar, and the alerts and notifications within the system ensure that everybody within the payments ecosystem - payroll professionals, global employers , and in country payroll providers are all in the loop and fully aware of what the other party is doing.
The global payroll manager has full control and visibility over the multi country payroll process and the integration capabilities of the platform allows for the secure transfer of crucial data between key departments.
All of this results in a much more efficient delivery of global payroll services -fast, flexible and digital -it is simply the future and it is accessible now.