Reliable data helps your business make smart decisions when facing change of any kind. In today’s economic and political climate, this is important for every organisation. Little wonder 54% of businesses want their payroll teams to spend more time on data analysis.1
Insights stemming from payroll data will accelerate your entry into new markets and help your expanding organisation avoid making ill-informed business decisions.
When expanding into a new country, you need to know:
- The costs of recruiting staff in the country where your company will be setting up operations (compensation benchmarking)
- The salaries, overheads and overtime of your payroll staff
- Whether there are any comparable locations in your organisation
Once you’ve set up business in the new geography, you’ll need to keep a close eye on productivity, wage costs, legislative changes, pay equity, investor requirements and currency fluctuations. You’ll also want to be able to benchmark all of this against similar sites across your company.
Go straight to source …
Payroll is where it all starts. Payroll data is the most accurate since it’s checked every time there’s a pay run (monthly or biweekly, for example). Yet, ironically, collecting it can still consume a lot of time if it’s held in disparate systems and differing formats.
Many HR and payroll teams are still spending needless hours trying to bring together information from different systems in multiple geographies. In fact, 41% of businesses would like to reduce manual effort by automating reconciliations between payroll and other business systems.1
… to become a source of strategic input
In our experience, the number of payroll providers you have in place differs drastically depending on two key factors. The first is whether you do or don’t have a global payroll strategy, and the second is whether your expansion has been organic or through acquisition.
Of the organisations that say they have no consistent payroll strategy when expanding internationally, around a quarter (26%) operate mostly on-premise systems, with a further 26% utilising a mix of on-premise systems and outsourced providers.
Companies have their own reasons for running these disparate systems. You may have legacy systems from mergers and acquisitions, or a local manager may have chosen a payroll vendor with a strong reputation in-country.
Whatever the reason, it makes life more difficult when you’re tasked with collecting data. Consolidating your payroll platforms shines a light into your payroll process, making it easier to identify workforce trends that could bolster or derail your business expansion.
A unified cloud-based platform could seamlessly integrate all your data, make it easy to find and share accurate, realtime data as and when you need it, and help keep it safe and secure.
Once you’ve sorted out your payroll data, things start to get really interesting. Find a payroll vendor who can connect your global payroll and global HR data and you’ll have invaluable information right across your workforce.
Use data to drive your payroll digital transformation
Data is the thread that links the three stages of any payroll function’s digital transformation.
- Optimisation
Any expanding company needs to optimise its operations. For payroll, this means simplifying, eliminating processing errors and driving cost efficiencies.
Optimising extends to the internal structure of your payroll function too. Whether your service delivery model is centralised, regionalised or location-specific, can you quickly source the data needed for business growth decisions?
- Visibility
This is a major benefit of bringing your HR and payroll solutions together.
When global leaders were asked what they wanted most from payroll digital transformation, the top two answers were:
- Integration of payroll with other business and HR systems
- More reliable cloud-based software
Visibility over spend is a must for the finance operation of any growing company. Whether your business is growing organically or expanding through mergers and acquisitions, you’re going to need reliable modelling, forecasting and reporting. And the ideal structure to deliver the data you need is one where payroll, HR and finance systems are fully integrated. But we discovered that only 47% of global businesses have integration between their payroll and a global accounting/finance system, and only 45% can say the same for their global HR system of record.1
For HR teams, visibility of employee data means advanced benchmarking, accurate benefits planning and less stress when reports are needed. And being able to spot and reorient trends in your workforce is arguably now more important than ever. For example, in their ‘Diversity matters even more’ study of 2023, McKinsey & Company reported that businesses in the top quartile for women and ethnic minority representation are 39% more likely to achieve financial outperformance versus companies in the bottom quartile.2
- Agility
Payroll optimisation yields visible, usable employee data, and it makes the third stage — agility — possible. Being able to adapt and find new ways of working comes only when you have the data needed to move quickly. Usable data means that not only can you respond to internal and external change, but you can also make accurate predictions and anticipate new developments.
Data-driven payroll will provide information that’s critical to your decision making, particularly around costs. And if you connect your payroll and HR data, you’ll have a wealth of workforce information that will help you succeed in new markets. In other words, data won’t just drive your payroll, it will drive your business growth.
“Now, with integrated systems, we can rely on our HR system to pull accurate data and generate insights and dashboards. This streamlined data flow has improved reporting quality, empowered our finance team and enhanced workforce planning, budgeting and tracking. Leadership now actively uses these insights for better business understanding and strategic decision making.”
— Oluyomi Okunowo
SVP of Total Reward and People Operations, Wella Company
1. ADP, The potential of payroll in 2025: Global payroll survey
2. McKinsey & Company, Diversity matters even more: The case for holistic impact report 2023.
