With our 23-year experience, we understand the pressures organizations are under to make payroll and supporting functions more efficient. Particularly in the current financial climate.
In Part One of this article, we explored administrative costs, automation and standardization, risk and errors, global visibility, and analytics. These areas are themselves major sources of efficiency and provide a transformative view of 60% of organizational expenditure. Part Two below goes further to highlight additional improvements/changes that can be made - fully supported by metrics.
It is significantly less costly and complex to operationally manage a single first-party platform than fragmented local systems.
Many organizations overlook how the payroll process is funded, IT security risk, benefits of a great employee experience, and the ability to scale. These four areas which we explore below can appear intangible and ‘invisible’ even though they are a large source of both revenue and efficiency.
Improvement 1 - Payroll Funding and Costs
Global payroll providers often fund payroll through the ‘currency of record’ in USD paid across multiple countries. When payments are made through a payment provider or in a foreign currency to a local provider, organizations can be charged ‘hidden’ rates and a mark-up of several percent. By avoiding additional layers, ensuring automation, and a greater understanding of the payment process, significant cost savings can be achieved PLUS swift and easy payroll issue rectification.
Improvement 2 - IT Security
Organizational risk can be a huge cost and the main security weaknesses as in every walk of life are ‘Human’. Also, the more systems an organization has, the larger the digital presence necessitating greater cyber security controls to ensure data security. Consolidating vendors and systems bring lower risk, costs, and system maintenance.
Improvement 3 – The Employee Experience
A number of studies show that organizations with happy, well-managed employees produce significantly greater profit. Multiple systems bring different applications per country for employees entering, managing, or retrieving data and payslips. This manual administration is time-consuming and can lead to errors.
By using a mobile app like Globalise’s in our integrated, first-party platform ‘Statement’ system, communications and data retrieval are improved. We can also add on expense management. Not only does this improve employee experience and onboarding, but crucially it saves significant time for HR and employees – a time saving that that can itself be monetized.
Improvement 4 - Scalability
A consolidated global payroll provider scales easily when expanding into new regions/countries. Especially if they offer a hybrid solution of global, local, expatriate, and Employer of Record solutions which we will discuss in our next article. When an existing onboarding process is in place, additional countries and employees are simple, quick to implement, and inexpensive to run.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why organizations should consider a single provider to increase efficiency, improve employee experience, and make transformational changes to business services. Some of these may feel ‘invisible’, but the cost efficiencies can be considerable and easily achieved.
A single global payroll solution can provide significant value – in fact much greater than the sum of its parts. Importantly, straightforward and immediate cost reductions can be achieved via reduced vendor management, appropriate funding, process efficiency, and improvements to IT security and Employee Experience.
By improving these areas plus those highlighted in our previous article (administrative costs, automation and standardization, risk and errors, global visibility, and analytics), efficiencies become transformative and payroll becomes a strategic enabler.
Contact us to learn more about our specialist skills, virtuous cycle, and how Globalise can help you achieve improvements and efficiencies from what you already have.