Imagine the hardships of a payroll leader from a global organization. Ensuring 100% accuracy in running payroll for one employee in Timbuktu, two in Turkey, three in Tunisia, and a similar spread of employees across geographies can become cumbersome and risky, especially when you are dealing with a myriad of vendors and diverse local processes across these geographies.
Managing long-tail payroll is never easy. Coordinating with multiple vendors, keeping track of the ever-changing local payroll and compliance regulations, receiving on-time inputs, and ensuring the employee experience is not compromised in this entire process are paramount. But, with most companies operating on a fragmented payroll landscape, this is not going to a no-brainer.
Multinational organizations need to ask one key question here – Is there a ‘silver bullet’ solution to manage payroll and compliance for the long-tail countries with a sparse employee population? The following are the key points multinational companies should keep in mind while exploring global payroll solutions for their long-tail countries.
1. Seek a truly global, yet a unified platform
Typically, payroll platforms available in the market either have limitations with respect to the countries, employee size, scope, and many a time, do not support customization.
The key is to choose a simple yet truly globalized payroll platform that acts as a “single source of truth” for all countries, irrespective of the employee count. Implementing an integrated solution that would enable enterprises to oversee the data, technology, and operations involved with their global payroll function is key. This would ensure all employees irrespective of where they work from are treated equally.
Learn more: What is unified multi-country payroll and how it benefits businesses
2. Partner with the right provider
While partnering with a payroll provider, it is important that you not only scrutinize the partner’s relevant experience and the partner’s maturity but its flexibility in providing customized solutions. Often, the bigger players do not render comprehensive full scope payroll/compliance services for smaller sized employee population. As a result, process control and visibility over managing a wide range of countries can see a dip.
Contrarily, solution providers who offer customized payroll solutions with the long-tail strategy at the core will help companies operating at a global scale to expand into new geographies with little skepticism from the payroll standpoint.
3. Ensure robust GLOCAL compliance
Managing multi-country payroll and adhering to country-specific compliance continues to be the primary challenge multi-national companies face today. In large or small countries alike, the compliance complexity is a huge deterrent to devising a global solution.
Proactive solutions that focus on global and local (glocal) compliance come with a compliance library for country-wise legal amendments, compliance calendars that help configure alerts, and compliance diagnosis tests to assess organizations based on their compliance.
