Nowadays, a global payroll department is a strategic player within the business; with consolidated and standardised data, reporting statistics, and predictive analytics providing a wealth of knowledge to drive all-crucial strategic business decisions. Data-driven companies require accurate and real-time data to drive decision making and given that a global payroll is one of the largest expenses for a global company, it is vital that leadership teams have access to this data.
So, how does global payroll reporting improve decision making?
In 2017, EY released survey results ‘How Are Companies Preparing for the Payroll of the Future’ indicating that payroll teams are putting a stronger focus on consolidating their provider’s capabilities and global reporting, with 78% of responding organisations stating that having a global delivery through a single provider is important to them. And over the last 4 years we have seen this to be true with the market’s desire to create a centralised approach to global payroll reporting to be a driving force behind the move to a single global payroll provider.
Global payroll reporting provides leadership teams with the means to make predictions and guide workforce planning. Take a company’s talent management, for example. By analysing payroll data, companies can identify skill gaps through employees nearing retirement or recently retiring, realise locations with higher performing employees, review retention trends and oversee expenditure changes involving third party and contractors.
Reporting on this information enables companies to identify upcoming expenditure, better establish salary bands and even determine cost effectiveness of utilising contractors full time employees in different regions.
Global payroll is incredibly complex, and compliance is a crucial element with companies needing to ensure they are meeting all legal requirements across all regions which they operate. Having access to accurate, consolidated real-time global payroll reporting is an easy way to add significant value to any risk mitigation strategies in place to ensure multi-country payroll compliance. More often than not, global companies are relying on local service providers for their expertise on country specific accounting and tax laws. The use of multiple payroll providers often leads to fragmented reporting and therefore a clouded view of key business data.
Companies are now seeing the true benefits of centralising their business activities and creating a single source of truth for their business data, utilising company-wide metrics to confirm essential in-country tax and accounting obligations are being met to quickly identify where actions are needed to ensure compliance.
Innovative technology like the Zalaris Payroll Solution accompanied with the Zalaris reporting & analytics suite, eases the challenge of extracting data from payroll systems so that it can be analysed and interpreted to help drive decision making, empowering businesses to easily gather company-wide metrics, on a global scale, to create interactive reports functionality to navigate through, filter, and sort all data. Access to these detailed data files ultimately provides leadership teams with the metrics needed to steer company-wide strategic human capital decisions.
It’s time for global companies to consolidate their global payrolls and begin to see the immediate advantages of having access to global reporting.
This post was written by Zalaris. They are an exhibitor on the HRTech247 Payroll, Time & Attendance floor in the technology hall here, and the SAP Partners floor in the Partners Hall here.
