Joseph Wood Krutch once said, “Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.” That quote rings very true. It may go without saying, but do a little research and you will find that more and more companies are going global, and that technology has played a big role in enabling that to happen.
Communication across the globe is easy and inexpensive today, and it makes sense to expand into other countries. And, now that we have companies with offices and branches around the world, we sometimes wonder what we would do without that technology. If it were to go away, we would lose efficiencies, communication, and the ability to collaborate.
So, as more companies expand their operations into additional countries, the need for a global payroll service provider will also continue to increase. For many years, companies have used a decentralized model for getting their global employees paid, using in-country vendors to process the payroll and keep up with legislation in that country. The company’s payroll department then gets the payroll data from each individual country, sometimes in another language or currency, and most often in a completely different format. Trying to consolidate that information can be a near impossible task.
“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
–Douglas Adams
Enter new innovative technology. Technology that makes things work! Not just platform enhancements, but revolutionary capabilities and transformative service methodologies that change the way global payroll professionals conduct their profession. The right global payroll technology can pull in payroll data from all those countries in the same format, language, and currency, and allow Payroll to create meaningful reports on the data. This provides true visibility into payroll costs, and can help a company in forecasting and budgeting.
So, what’s on the horizon?
- Gross to Net: Global payroll providers have still been outsourcing gross to net because there just wasn’t technology to handle it for every country. iiPay is changing that. iiPay’s innovative technology includes bringing gross-to-net in-house within our system, shortening cut off times, and allowing more time for review and approvals of the payroll. As companies expand, this will be a must-have solution for high-growth companies, and iiPay has it!
- Robotics/Automation: We are also seeing more interest in robotics and automation in the global payroll industry. It is becoming increasingly important for companies to automate as much of the payroll process as possible, primarily to remove the risk involved with manual data entry. iiPay already automates much of the process and we have a road map in place to drive “zero-touch” payroll in the next 2-5 years.
- Mobile Accessibility: In today’s fast-paced world, people are always on the go. And they want to be able to access their most important information wherever they are and whenever it is convenient to them. iiPay provides online payslips, accessible on any web-enabled device. The employee can toggle between local and corporate language. No matter where they are. Mobile apps are on the horizon, making this process even easier for the employee.
iiPay’s vision is to simplify the customer experience to our clients. We provide a single solution, which we are continually improving through new innovations. We integrate data directly into our system, eliminating manual errors. We are working to eliminate the dependency on in-country providers. We facilitate easy access for employees to see their paycheck and related data.