5 Benefits of Consolidating your Data and Processes into One Unified Payroll

96% of US companies call themselves confident in conducting business overseas, proof (if you need it) that we live in a truly global working economy. This leads to a complexity of global working operations that can’t be underestimated. An enterprise may have a presence in five different countries around the world, and then within those countries, have two or three additional entities set up to manage various brands, services, revenue lines, or teams.

Each company’s organizational structure and business processes will be different, but one thing remains the same. By joining up every piece of data for your payroll across the whole organization, and migrating it into a single consolidated system, you will be able to access a truly accurate view of your global workforce, in many cases for the first time.

We call this unification of payroll, and it has more benefits than you might be aware of.

Reducing the Burden of Compliance

Every country in which your organization has a presence will have its own laws, compliance mandates, and expectations. Let’s look at overtime for example. In Brazil, the law prohibits shifts that are over 10 hours per day, and requires a 50% increase in hourly salary for any overtime, raising this to 100% on Sundays or holidays. In Germany however, the limits on working hours are 8 hours per day, and can only be extended to 10 hours per day if in a period of six months the overall average working time per day remains 8 hours or less.

On top of that, outside of the service industry, working on Sundays or on public holidays is almost always illegal. This is two countries, and one single area of knowledge. Now consider all the countries you have entities within, or would like to expand into as part of your global strategy, and specific laws as disparate as minimum wage, benefits, tax, or reporting.

A single, unified system for handling global payroll does more than just automatically provide this data for each of your locations. As a minimum, your payroll provider will be able to advise on changes and updates to local laws, offer opportunities for cost-avoidance, and answer niche questions on tax, compliance or benefits information in any specific region.

On top of this, the right provider takes the responsibility of knowing and complying with this information off your hands, and contractually will hold any liability in terms of remaining compliant with local laws via the consolidated platform.

Adding a Streamlined Approach to End-to-end Payroll

From an internal perspective, with a single master system for payroll, all employees know who their payroll provider is, who their point of contact should be, and how to approach that person with any issues or questions. With onboarding for example, there is a set approach to taking on new employees which can be verbalized at the earliest stages so that the process has as little friction as possible.

Rather than have 10 different payroll providers across 10 different countries, all of which see your organization as a small part of the whole – a global provider can see you as an international enterprise that is so much more than the sum of its parts. This also means that as you expand, your payroll provider can provide insight and expertise on your organization as a single unit, an added benefit that you won’t find if you use local providers.

This streamlined focus and single point of contact has more benefits operationally, too. At all times, all payroll data will be translated into a single global language, to make it easy for you as a global payroll manager to understand the impact and day to day workings of each regional entity. Your Italian entity’s records or payroll invoices may currently need resource-intensive translation before they can be compared in any real way to your American ones, for example.

At Papaya Global, we ensure salary can be viewed as a cost item across all locations, in one single global ontology.

Providing a Global Understanding of Cash Flow

A unified approach to payroll also helps you to start looking at your organization as a single entity. This includes benefiting from smart business intelligence tools that can glean insight from your consolidated data. Whether you’re from Finance, Procurement, HR or Operations, you can see all the information you need about the payroll costs of each location. Without a single source of data, consolidating this information is impossible, or requires time-consuming excel work or expensive integrations.

With this information to hand, global payroll managers can make smart decisions for the business as a whole, such as:

• Noticing that a particular entity is superfluous to requirements, and therefore shutting it down to save costs.
• Identifying a particularly efficient location and moving additional operations to that region.
• Highlighting a certain group of workers that are being overpaid, either in commission or base salary.
• Recognizing that a particular area has a high amount of turnover, and looking into why this may be happening.

Added Layer of Data Security

A single payroll provider also gives your enterprise much greater peace of mind over the security and privacy of your employee data. GDPR and CCPA are just two examples of compliance mandates that include HR and employee information. With multiple local providers for payroll, it’s impossible to know that your data is being handled according to best-practices. You may not even have the rights to ask for visibility into how they store, manage or encrypt information both at transit and at rest.

At Papaya, we take data security and privacy very seriously. We are GDPR compliant, SOC 1, Type II and ISO certified, and use multi-factor authentication and SSO to protect our data. In addition, no personal data is ever sent by email or in external cloud files, as everything is contained within the platform itself. Of course, as we handle an enterprises’ entire international payroll, there is no sending data between vendors, only between your existing systems and Papaya with our best-practice security front and center.

This is not just about providing peace of mind to you as an enterprise, or even achieving compliance. It’s about your employee safety and their own personal information remaining private and secure, and is an added benefit you can present to your candidates on joining your company.

Improved Capabilities of a Unified Platform

We’re focused on something a whole lot bigger than any single region, or country. As an enterprise-level provider of global payroll services, our platform has far greater capabilities than you could expect a local provider to include. One example is our integrated auditing capabilities, that automatically audit your data through the system every single payroll cycle. An added level of compliance, a reduction in errors, and one more task that you don’t have to worry about, are only some of the benefits an automated payroll system can provide.

But our expertise is anything but local. We have local partners in 140 countries, customers from hypergrowth start-ups to multinational enterprises, and a unique governance model comprising customer success project managers, centre of excellence team and our local in-country partners. This provides deeply knowledgeable stakeholders in areas from tax and compliance to employment law and recruitment, so that you get the global insight that you need, when you need it.

Papaya Global – a Risk Free Approach to Unified Payroll

We recognize the complexities involved in a decision like consolidating global payroll, but the benefits are too important to ignore. To make the transition easier, and reduce risk for your organization, we create a smart roadmap with your business stakeholders to discuss a timeline for going live in each location.

After migrating your data from your existing systems into the Papaya platform, we run what we call a Shadow Payroll. This allows us to run Papaya in parallel with your existing systems, to ensure that all the figures align, tax and salary is being calculated accurately and as expected, and your processes are working without a hitch.

Let’s talk consolidation! Reach out to speak to one of our payroll experts.