Leveraging the Power of the Whole in Payroll Management for Global Organizations

'The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.'-Aristotle

Aristotle did perfectly exemplify the fundamental influence of the whole - most of today's innovations are indeed harnessing the immense power of the whole in its true sense.

In this era of disruptive technological solutions, every moment unravels new inventions, simplifying various aspects of life - from daily living to enterprise management. But it is the business landscape that has seen some of the most path-breaking revolutions reinforcing the strength of the whole - with concepts such as end-to-end, integrated, connected, and networking emphasizing the value of complete solutions.

Payroll service management is one such critical area of relevance that has witnessed the passing trend of best-of-breed solutions to eventually realize the value of the whole. This is why an organization must find the right payroll service management partner.

What does global payroll management system mean?

Global payroll, also known as international payroll, can be viewed as a by-product of global expansion. When you expand your operations from a small business to different countries and begin hiring talent from all over the world, you must also upgrade your payroll processing. This means that, rather than running payroll in a single country, you must manage payroll in multiple countries around the world, i.e. in all of your hiring locations, while adhering to all of the various local labour and tax laws.

Global payroll service, on the other hand, should be more than just managing payroll in various locations. Among the many task, some of them would include details of the employee’s monthly salary, incentives, bonuses, tax deductions, net pay, timely payments and much more. For payroll system operations to be truly global and efficient, they must first be standardised across all locations and then centralised in a single location. However, to achieve a truly global payroll solution, businesses must overcome numerous challenges. But what challenges have led to this shift in balance favouring whole, end-to-end solutions as against hastily brought together best-of-breed solutions in payroll management process? Let's take a look at some of the major hurdles.

Also Read: Unearth your Ideal Payroll Management Partner

Overcoming major global payroll challenges

1. Multiple sources for multiple solutions:
   With more than one provider sourcing multiple silo-ed solutions, frameworks, tools, applications and platforms for a single enterprise, integrating all these isolated functionalities into a coherent, operational whole is a huge challenge. The entire purpose of a unified payroll management solution is lost since each part was competent only within its own boundaries of functionality. When stitched together, the overall payroll solution has way too many loopholes.
2. Managing payroll compliance risks:
   With businesses going global, integrating all the variances in compliance parameters across geographies to deliver up-to-date guidelines on payroll compliance is quite unimaginable.
3. Upgrading payroll service parameters:
   Change is a definite constant in the payroll system universe. As organizations grow and expand, the payroll service management team’s toughest challenge is to bring all systems on par with changing landscapes through seamless upgrades, reorganizations and transitions. But in a disconnected best-of-breed environment, establishing smoothly evolving systems is tough.
4. Integration and Best Practices:
   Integrating an international payroll solution is a difficult task in and of itself. Various HRIS systems will need to be consolidated, if not replaced. It is inefficient and error-prone to constantly adapt existing and new technologies into a global HR process.

Instead, a well-defined road map is required. A road-map for overcoming the problem of integrating into targeted projects using payroll cloud solutions, which will be implemented in manageable steps. The use of cloud payroll technology standardizes international payroll, reducing the need for customization. As a result, payroll processes are more efficient and best practices are globalized.

5. Balancing standardization with flexibility:
   Managing a payroll at a global level requires expert juggling between standardizing good practices across geographies, yet allowing for a significant percentage of flexibility to incorporate local variances in legislation and work cultures. Only an end-to-end and structured payroll system can incorporate this requirement.
6. Data Management:
   While global HR teams may find it difficult to store and report data, having the right payroll system can make the process go more smoothly. Payroll data stored locally takes time to compile and is frequently out of sync with other systems within the organisation. Manually processing fragmented data is prone to errors and frequently results in the data being incomplete or out-of-date before it is ready for analysis. All of this makes it difficult to maintain data security.

A unified global payroll solution standardises and centralises your data while remaining compliant and transparent. An efficient international payroll management software provides both the employer and the employee with real-time reporting. Payroll cloud technology enables self-service data retrieval, saving time and resources previously spent on manual data input and updates.

So with most of the payroll solution requirements pointing to the need for a holistic automation of services, why should you still be focusing on gluing together ill-fitting parts of a disjointed solution? What can a comprehensive end-to-end solution deliver? The whole and beyond! Let's take a look at a few examples of what you can gain from a complete solution:

Essential features of Payroll Management Software

• A single, unified platform covering all functionalities
• A software that allows immense flexibility to create, modify and map rules to define payroll system logic - from earnings and attendance to statutory compliance
• Compliance across multiple countries for global operations
• The ability to manage the entire gamut of complexities involved in accommodating multi-currency, multi-country payrolls
• A complete business-driven approach that maps operational requirements with payroll solutions
• Cognitive capabilities that simplifies payroll system related decision making and processing speed
• Anytime, anywhere, permission-based access to employee records for all specific payroll system related information
• The crucial ability to interact individually with users across all categories through in-depth data analytics and insights
• Multi-channel access to accurate payroll system information including SMS, apps, bots, and many other interfaces
• Real-time analytical processing of information, delivering data insights on payroll service status to administrators with zero latency
• Flexible reporting format including instantaneous and periodic report generation for stakeholders including financial controllers

Checkout: Payroll must-haves: Audit & Controls

This comprehensive platform contributes flexible and scalable processes to the entire user community, manages varying data volumes and meets multiple dimensions of business criticality. Well, isn't this proof enough of the power of the whole being much greater the cumulative power of the individual parts? So, why wait to face more challenges when you can make a move right away? Step up to Ramco Payroll and experience the cutting-edge and seasoned functionalities of the solution realize Aristotle’s Philosphy.

At Ramco Systems, we aim to provide a unified payroll software which simplifies the HR functions. Our unified Ramco Global Payroll offering Payce addresses the need of Global organizations which have multicountry footprints. Drop a comment below or write to us at contact@ramco.com.