If getting clear, contextual insights on your payroll management is proving challenging, you may not be getting optimal efficiency and enabling you to scale fluidly. Harmonizing your payroll management with your overall company objectives is key for long term payroll success.
Without integrated global payroll solutions, payroll often defaults to being managed across all localities with a piecemeal, fragmented system, that provides minimal-to-no standardization. Each local office has their own way of managing payroll and reporting, and each reports information in their own formats and currencies. Surviving on a system built this way is likely to result in more errors and less visibility. Less visibility can cause undesirable consequences such as budgeting issues as payroll is one of the largest expenditures for any company; thus, limiting the benefits payroll data can bring to making strategic business decisions.
The 3 Pillars of Global Payroll Management
One: Understanding Your Costs
There are several inherent challenges associated with attempting to understand your payroll costs. When your global processes lack standardization, for instance, the undertaking becomes very difficult on a global scale. It’s laborious to gain any kind of strategic oversight, and even if you have visibility of your payroll process for each country, you may still lack local or global context. When the data you have reports spend in different currencies and formats, it’s difficult to compare without time consuming and often manual conversions. Further manual intervention is needed to acquire strategic insights into this data, and with manual reporting methods invariably being high touch, errors are likely to be introduced.
The key to obtaining visibility into your payroll costs is integration. Integrated global payroll solutions allow you to end your practice of localization that complicates the global payroll process. You’ll have the ability to see all facets of your payroll and gain full insight into your data with the assistance of standardized reporting and formatting.
A global management platform also aids in strategic decision making by helping you understand your costs better. It provides your business with a repository for information, and with this central database, you are able to quickly generate reports for further analysis.
Two: Improving Accuracy
In modern business, data is vital to being able to make strategic decisions and maintain steady growth. For payroll in particular, the job of payroll professionals is much easier if the data they are working with is trustworthy. A more accurate system makes everyone happier – employees receive correct paychecks on time and you have confidence that the right amount of money is going out. In payroll processes, as with the rest of your business, accuracy is the goal.
Through an integrated payroll management system, you are able to remove manual intervention and create more accurate processes. By reducing the amount of manual data input and management required for the system to run, you are able to create a low-touch environment. Integrated global payroll solutions significantly reduce the need for manual tasks such as input, reformatting, data validation, and data conversion in which payroll employees must interact with the data directly – increasing risk through human error. The less the data is touched, the less likely an error is to occur.
Three: Adopting Automation
All aspects of payroll management can be improved through introducing more automation into your processes. It ensures your payroll employees spend their workdays on productive tasks by saving them time inputting data, reducing errors (and the time it takes to fix them), and preventing the waste of resources through unnecessary manual processes. With an automated system, you’ll have the assurance that nothing in your payroll has changed because employees haven’t needed to touch it several times to complete payrolls. This predictability gives you peace of mind as well as ease of use.
One of the most important areas that automation can improve payroll processes is through the configuration of general ledger (GL) files. They’re prepared across all business departments, contributing to the bigger picture combined general ledger for the company, but the payroll GL is especially important and it’s vital that the GL is correct for Finance to make accurate assessments of the business’ financial health. Because the GL pulls data from different sources for one report, automation can be a huge asset and dramatically speed up this process.
Automating the configuration of GL files – and automation in general – isn’t possible without integration, though. Otherwise someone needs to pull data together manually from multiple locations and do the work to contextualize it.
A Stable Foundation: Global Payroll Solutions
Through a management information system, you can build an integrated and standardized global payroll. These three pillars – Understanding your Costs, Improving Accuracy and Adopting Automation – are the scaffolding your global business needs to gain strategic focus and scalability.
If you would like to discuss these benefits to your business more, contact the experts at iiPay. We’d love to speak with you!