As companies expand internationally, managing payroll efficiently and gaining insights into the composition and labor cost of the global workforce becomes increasingly challenging. The complexity arises from fragmented local legislations and the diversity of local payroll systems, each reflecting unique historical and cultural contexts. Especially for small and midsize international employers, the level of digitization in payroll processes varies greatly across countries. In many countries, the exchange of monthly payroll data is based on written e-mail communications with attachments containing unstructured data.

Reduce the cost of transactional processes

This reality poses significant challenges for HR Directors striving to develop robust HR policies that demonstrate added value to business stakeholders and employees. With the current scarcity in the labor market, HR Directors' top priorities are more than ever focused on attracting and retaining talent. Given the constraints of limited resources, it's therefore imperative to minimize the cost of transactional processes like payroll, so that resources can be allocated towards activities directly contributing to the attraction and retention of employees and to the company's growth objectives. While transactional processes are critical, they do not inherently add value. Yet, the consequences of inefficient and/or ineffective payroll processes can be severe.

Efficiency in transactional processes, such as payroll, necessitates appropriate technology. While large multinational enterprises have long had access to such technology, small and midsize international employers have often been left behind. However, that has changed now. The good news is that all multi-national enterprises can now access integration and digitization benefits through the use of our platform. And since the platform can be used in conjunction with most local payroll systems, the threshold to start digitizing your global payroll processes has never been lower. Employers can continue working with their chosen in-country payroll providers (ICPs) and retaining their direct access to them, while leveraging integration and digitization possibilities for both payroll input and output processes. This reduces the implementation effort for the customer to only a few days per country.

Speak the language of your ICPs

To maximize the benefits of this model, however, it is essential for ICPs to embrace digital workflows, facilitating fully digitized data exchanges with their clients. Without this digitized exchange, global payroll processing remains manual, error-prone, time-consuming and inefficient for the multi-country employer, hindering detailed insights into the composition and labor cost of the total international workforce, but more importantly, it will continue to force multi-national enterprises to allocate too many resources to a transactional process that could be automated.

To communicate effectively with someone, you need to speak their language. The same is true for ICPs. They all have their specific pay codes, data fields and/or data validations. So, if you want them to treat your payroll data digitally, you must express the monthly payroll input in their payroll language. And that is exactly what our platform does: depending on the country where your employee is working, the data in our platform will be translated into a different local language. As a matter of fact, they are even stored in local language so that there can be no misunderstanding about the pay codes to use. This way, our users are always 100% certain that each pay component and each calendar entry receives the correct pay code.

Why digitized data exchange is in everyone's best interest

Now your ICPs are reassured that you speak their local payroll language, we can take it one step further: rather than manually typing over your written monthly payroll instructions and attachments, your ICPs could now treat your payroll input as a batch file. Since the file they will receive from our platform already contains the correct local pay codes, there is no more need to interpret or assign the pay codes, hence the possibility to submit the file for batch processing and the opportunity for your ICPs to substantially improve their internal efficiency. For those ICPs ready for fully digitized and automated integration, the exchange of data can also be done by "Application Programming Interface" (API) for even more efficient processing. When using such an API, the data are sent directly from our platform into the ICP's payroll system.

It is clear that both the file-based and API-based data exchange are also in the interest of ICPs: they will spend substantially less time for the monthly input of the data, so that more time is available for advisory activities. And the bigger the local population of employees, the bigger the efficiency gain will be.

Start your global payroll transformation now

Don't let the manual data exchange with your current ICPs impede the efficiency of your global payroll processes and start your digital transformation now. It has never been easier to streamline your global payroll operations!  

And with your global payroll operations streamlined, you are all set to elevate your HR function to new heights and to become an employer of choice for both existing and new employees!

About Paybix

Paybix offers integrated payroll solutions to multi-country employers, based on its global payroll platform Epix. The Paybix platform unifies and digitizes global payroll operations leveraging on digitized and localized payroll data exchange with ICPs. The beauty of the platform is its plug-and-play nature, allowing seamless integration with any ICP and minimizing the implementation effort to be done by payroll administrators. The platform reduces significantly the time spent on monthly payroll processing both for the employer and its ICPs and offers detailed insights into the composition and labor cost of an international workforce. Paybix has partner agreements with numerous ICPs, covering in total more than 100 countries.

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Would you like to explore the potential benefits of our global payroll platform for your organization, or could you use a sounding board for your international HR and/or payroll technology stack, do not hesitate to reach out to hans.joris@paybix.eu.

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Would you like to attend one of our live demos? Then make sure to check our monthly events here.

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