COMPLIANCE
The answer Perhaps the easiest answer is that there isn’t a right and wrong answer here. It depends on factors such as the makeup of your company, its geographical footprint, the volumes in which countries you operate in and the complexity of your company payroll. Ultimately, the most important factor is the employee experience and if that’s your French team getting the local language support and quick answers to their payroll queries, then you should consider a hybrid or local model, depending on your other countries. If you have a small number of countries widely dispersed, for example United Kingdom, Ireland, Namibia and Caymen Islands, having local providers might give you the best service and value without having an expensive and technologically advanced system setup for truly global payroll. But if you have many offices across the globe and you want a global payroll offering, having a global provider will probably be the best option; just make sure it works, and the French team is happy. n
But how can a single payroll system handle the gulf in differences between Swedish maternity regulations and Austria’s thirteenth- and fourteenth-month payrolls? Or the challenges with Spanish social security against the constantly changing minimum wages of South American countries? The simple answer is, with immense difficulty. CloudPay recently suggested in an article that advances in payroll technology may have peaked until legislation starts to standardise and simplify. But some companies are managing to offer truly global solutions with positive results. Systems are now in operation and readily available that can be configured to each of the 195 countries’ unique traits, operated by the client or on a managed basis by the provider. Global systems like this can be costly to set up and run on a managed basis and service can be slow as tickets bounce around offshore teams, meaning a potential for slower answers to the end users; your people. But, on the positive side, you get a unified global payroll experience with employees receiving the same look and feel and the same user experience for
payroll especially when combined with a global HR setup.
Hybrid and local payroll A surefire way to get the best local support, especially for challenging countries such as France, is to have a local payroll provider manage the payroll for that country. The local language is guaranteed, which can be a challenge in some countries, and the local legislation and nuances are known extensively by the provider. An available option is to work in a hybrid model, where the global solution you choose takes the bigger countries you have, the less challenging payrolls or even the smaller ones, and use a local provider in the countries you know need extra support. With the development in integrations and middleware, it’s never been easier to connect these systems and your HR platform for a unified feel with a local footprint. The downfalls here might be that the connectivity isn’t as seamless as the unified model and the local providers aren’t going to have the encouragement to cooperate with the global provider, so you’ve got up weigh those options.
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 104 | October 2024
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