The Payslip team attended the recent American Payroll Association (APA) Congress payroll conference in Las Vegas. This was a great opportunity to meet and network with fantastic global payroll professionals, industry peers, analysts and experts. After two years indoors due to the pandemic, there was widespread enthusiasm for face-to-face contact and there is no better city than Las Vegas to enjoy some social interaction!
Our CEO and CCO both had speaking slots at the event where we had the opportunity to discuss how our global payroll control platform fits with the future of global payroll delivery and management. In a busy week, we had lots of enthusiastic people visit our booth and discuss their global payroll system challenges and payroll processing pain points-there is so much happening in the world of global payroll management, especially at rapidly growing organizations. The need for automation, embracing change and future-proofing payroll services were high on the list.
We listened and learned a lot, a key theme that occurred time and again during our conversations was around the need to fix global payroll functionality. In this article, we will outline a few steps you can take to fix your global payroll and ensure you have a global payroll solution that is ready to overcome the challenges and position you for growth in the future.
Step 1 - Standardize your global payroll data and processes
It is very difficult to have any real visibility and control over your multi-country global payroll if you are constantly operating with different payroll data formats and different processes for each country. This is not efficient and certainly not sustainable.
The best approach is to take all of your global payroll data coming from your multiple sources such as local country global payroll providers and HCM systems, then categorize it all at a global level. This way, you develop a single way of working across all of your different countries-same data, same format- globally standardized but flexible enough to allow for local country pay element nuance.
Next you standardize the payroll operations processes within your various global payroll teams-once they are working with standardized data, it is easier to develop a set of best practices to follow across each of your countries. When you are working with standardized data and processes, everything about global payroll delivery and management becomes easier, faster and more cost-effective.
Step 2 - Automate global payroll where possible
A key concern that everybody we spoke to had been around the time-consuming nature of manual data entry, spreadsheet analysis and the transfer of data via email. It is simply taking up too much time and global payroll professionals are struggling just to keep their heads above water with in-house payroll and get employees paid accurately on time. There is little room for anything else, and as soon as they are finished, another payrun begins and the process starts again-this is simply unsustainable.
Leveraging robotic process automation (RPA) is the answer-here you automate all of the manual data entry points which are repeatable and recurring. The technology does the heavy lifting by entering bulk file uploads, and then checking and validating the data in seconds. Global payroll professionals then only need to focus on any anomalies which are identified-they can fix them quickly and move on to other work like reporting and analysis.
Automated payroll data feeds can come in from HCM systems and local country payroll providers-they just need to be set up on a centralized platform where you can operate everything from a single system. The process is streamlined, everything happens at a much quicker pace and accuracy levels are significantly boosted due to the lack of human touch points.
Step 3 - Connect related global payroll systems via powerful integrations
Global payroll delivery and management cannot exist in isolation-it never has and never will. There has always been a need for bidirectional data flows between departments that are connected to payroll, specifically human resources and finance. A lot of relevant payroll data is located in the HCM system at a lot of multinationals while the finance operations team have an increasing need for data flows from global payroll to come into their systems to help them with their analysis and cost reporting work.
Connecting these three interconnected departments and systems via smooth and agile integration technology capabilities result in a win for all three departments. Dataflows into and out of these three departments can also be automated for further streamlining and efficiency. When you introduce these important integrations into your payroll delivery process, a lot of manual work that is currently duplicated across the various systems, disappears as it is no longer needed.
Step 4 - Control and manage your own global payroll providers
We had several conversations with people who felt they might need to reduce or streamline the number of providers or payroll partners they had to deal with. We challenged them on this by stating that they simply needed a better way to manage them. Local country expertise and payroll providers will always be needed for multi-country payroll delivery. Surrendering control of them over to an aggregator model or looking to reduce the number that you work with is not really the approach you want to take.
Instead, you want to maintain full choice and control over who delivers your payroll-then manage them all on a single technology platform so you can always see exactly what is happening in each of your payroll countries and jurisdictions.. This way, you maintain control by having the right to swap out, remove or change a payroll provider that is not meeting your expectations. You get to choose who you work with, add new providers as you grow on scale, and stay in complete control of your payroll strategy.
Step 5 - Manage global payroll in one place
This is really about moving over to a global payroll control platform where you can access, view and manage all of your payroll countries via a single payroll platform interface. This enables you to centrally manage your country and achieve the level of visibility and control that you need to manage payroll challnegs in a growing organization today.
When you are managing your payroll on a global payroll control platform, you get to leverage the digital tools and technology innovation that comes with it. Digital dashboards for task management, digital audit trails for compliance confirmation, system alerts for reminders and lots more can be utilized so that your entire payroll team gets to manage their countries in a faster, smarter and better way.
Smart reporting tools and analytics can then be used to run detailed, comprehensive and consolidated real-time multi-country reporting. This will enable you to view and compare costs across countries-you can drill down into the micro-level pay element details for detailed analysis and also zoom back out for the global level view and bigger picture insights. This is the kind of reporting needed to satisfy a range of stakeholder requests within your organization for payroll data and reporting.
So, there you have it-5 clear steps to fix global payroll! These steps solve the common challenges and pain points experienced by many people at multinational companies around the world today when delivering and managing multi-country payroll. These five steps are also the future of payroll as a digital technology platform is the clear solution for many of the chokepoints that exist in payroll today.
The good news is that these five steps can happen a lot quicker than you might think. Payslip has helped many companies transform the way they deliver and manage their multi-country payroll. Our experienced team is ready and waiting to guide you through the process- get in touch with us today for a platform demonstration or more information on the above.
For information on the Payslip Platform contact us today.