Payroll BI: What it is and Why You Need It

In today’s global business environment, success in managing your global workforce depends increasingly on how well you use the data at your disposal. As payroll moves steadily towards full automation, it provides a wealth of data analytics and Business Intelligence (BI), giving you unprecedented insights into your workforce spending.

BI includes organized and framed information from your database to help you make actionable business decisions based on the insights you need. The best ones are updated in real time so that you always have the latest information at your fingertips. Regular analytics can help you understand how your company grew to its current level, but BI is oriented towards helping you plan for growth in the future.

What makes payroll BI so essential? Payroll, be it local or a global payroll, is nearly always the largest expense of any company. Decisions based on payroll have far-reaching effects, impacting human resources, finance, and global strategic planning. Because of the sensitive nature of payroll, even small mistakes can cost money in employee turnover and deteriorate trust among the workers who remain.

At the same time, having access to accurate and precise BI data can help you spot areas of your business that need improvement, such as excessive overtime pay in one department when an additional worker would ultimately cost less, or a budget shortfalls in another department.

Drawing on your payroll BI can accelerate your company’s growth and guide you in the right direction. The following are some of the ways BI helps you make good decisions:

Easy Analysis of Global Payroll

With so much of the budget allocated to payroll, you want easy access to all your spending information. With BI, you can see your entire workforce at a single glance. You have all the information you need to accurately assess your investments and choose the right path to fulfill your company’s objectives.

BI reports can measure virtually any aspect of your employment programs. You can compare reports over periods, projects, or locations, and identify the biggest expenses. You can see the difference between the gross and net costs for each employee in different countries and different markets.

Ideally, your BI system would be an organic part of your automated platform, not software added to process the data you have, and it should require minimal manual process on your part. With effective BI, you don’t have to compare spreadsheets and Excel files from different countries to find out the costs of workers. The information is already in one place. You don’t have to convert currencies to determine real costs. That’s what distinguishes BI from other analytics. It is oriented to the purpose you need.

Data Visualization

Visibility is one of the key factors in simplifying payroll analysis. It’s also one of the biggest differences between the old way of manual data crunching and the new, technology-based way of doing it. With manual processing, visuals never went beyond charts and graphs. With BI, whole worlds of visuals are now available.

When looking at global employment figures, for example, BI might present a map of the world with your employment information for every country where your company operates. Visual symbols of all kinds can be employed to make the information easier to understand and process.

When data is presented using visualizations, information is easier to see and unexpected trends have room to emerge. Comparing visual presentation to working with spreadsheets is like going from an hardback encyclopedia to discovering the capabilities of Google.

Important Alerts

Being compliant of local employment laws in multiple countries at the same time can be overwhelming without automation. It means keeping track of all employee work visas for expatriate workers, a wide range of government filing requirements as well as understanding the  stark variance between pay slips in different countries.

BI allows you to enter all of the information into your automated system and create push alerts for all key filing dates, VISA expiration, contract end dates, birthdays, and any other timely information.  You never have to worry about missing an important deadline – which takes the strain out of global expansion.

Maximize the Data You Have

Payroll is not only your largest budget item. It is also a vast source of spending data. Papaya Global’s international payroll software incorporating a BI module is an effective way to monitor that spending and analyze its effectiveness.

Automation has many advantages beyond data collection – it saves staff time, eliminates human errors, and ensures legal compliance across the globe. It also brings together information from many sources into a single dashboard, which serves as the database for the BI.

The business world is growing ever more global and increasingly automated. Unfortunately, many payroll departments are resisting the move from their aging manual systems, depriving themselves of high level BI.

BI is already a built-in module as part of Papaya Global platform. Don’t let your company fall behind. With a tool as powerful as BI, don’t let your competition get there first.