Global Payroll Services: Your Partner In International Growth

Global payroll uses a system of in-country experts to compliantly and accurately pay employees situated around the world. These experts will process payroll for the employees in their country, submitting the pay run figures to a central dashboard or account manager, they will also file any required submissions to the local government relating to your payroll. During this process, experts will need to consider factors such as country-specific regulations, taxes, insurance and more.

Then, once the total pay run figures for every country are submitted, the employer pays the amount in full to the employees, and the in-country experts ensure each employee receives relevant paperwork, such as a pay stub and supporting tax documents.

Depending on the amount of payroll you need to run and the knowledge of global payroll requirements for specific countries that you may already have, there are two different ways that you can run international payroll:

· Outsourced payroll – Where your business fully outsources its global payroll to an already established company that has in-country experts, the software to process the calculations and submissions, along with the backing of multiple team members to give high quality and timely support.
· Managed in-house – Where you train your in-house payroll department on the payroll requirements for all countries you are expanding your business into. Often you will have to acquire expensive in-country payroll software to be able to make the local tax and government submissions, as well as calculate tax in a compliant manner.

Outsourcing the global payroll process means that customers can focus on their business whilst the service provider takes care of running your payroll solution, including any compliance matters, security, or other difficulties associated with managing payroll in other countries.

As global payroll services vary, even within one company, there is always the opportunity to customise the service depending on your needs. You may want to include items like:

· Calculation of pay and any deductions
· Calculation of employer payroll taxes or deductions
· Benefit payments and administration
· Recording and submitting necessary reports to the respective authorities
· Making the necessary payments (tax, social security etc.)

Global payroll services should include:

· A dedicated point of contact for all of your payroll questions
· Complaint, accurate and on time Payroll processing
· Payslip, or pay stub, distribution
· Assistance in payroll audit
· Country-specific reporting
· Where possible, facilitate direct local currency payments to your employees
· Data entry & processing into the payroll system
· Personnel & document production
· Annual declarations
· Tax and social security deductions

When expanding to a new country, or countries, increasing the expertise in-house is often expensive and time-consuming, especially when software is also required. Hiring specialist staff with expertise in a specific country’s payroll is often far more challenging, especially as the subject is so niche, even finding a new colleague with the language requirements could be difficult, especially when you are starting somewhere new.

The expense of hiring or training can easily enter the thousands. If that employee leaves, companies will have to hire and retrain again. An international payroll provider is already established in a variety of countries and can therefore get your employees on pay run in a matter of days, not weeks, and best of all you don’t have to worry about the software or the training, it’s already handled.

The set-up of global payroll depends on the number of countries you want to expand to and the legislation that exists there. For example, scaling into one country with a simpler payroll legislative system with a basic tax structure is going to take less time than expanding into a country with regional tax variations.

IRIS Global Workforce Management tailors its solutions to best complement a business’s goals and needs. To ensure confidence, accuracy, and compliance, every customer will have direct access to a dedicated payroll manager. With direct and personal support, you can entrust that your payroll solution will be delivered with limited disruption or delay.

IRIS has HR Consultancy support available, should you need support with any tricky employment relation issue or just general advice on the best practice in that country.