Multinational Businesses Struggle to Take Payroll Global

London, 16th May 2019 – More than half of organisations do not have the ability to report across all of their payroll operations globally. Research conducted by the Global Payroll Association, in association with SD Worx, the leading provider in Payroll and HR services, shows that even with increasing compliance considerations such as Gender Pay Gap reporting, many multi-country businesses still do not have sufficient visibility over the payroll function. The study investigated the challenges that senior payroll professionals from global businesses are facing and how they are using technology to find solutions.

This lack of unified reporting accentuates the challenge of delivering consistent policies and processes. In fact, this is the number one challenge for organisations when operating payroll across multiple countries. The ability to find information on legislation and compliance and local legislation knowledge are the next most common issues that organisations encounter. 

“The pressure on payroll departments is growing every year,” says Jean-Luc Barbier, Vice President Global Solutions, SD Worx. “New regulations will continue to add to workloads and businesses need to have systems in place to manage this accurately and effectively. It is becoming increasingly evident that payroll data has an important role to play in improving business performance and consistent reporting is pivotal to that.”

Many businesses are overcoming such challenges by taking payroll digital. However, despite the benefits of efficiency, speed and accuracy that digitisation can deliver, a sizeable proportion of organisations are only managing payroll processes and schedules manually. Today, 12 percent of businesses do not use smart technology to handle payroll processes. The majority of organisations (72 percent) manage payroll processes and schedules through a mix of online and manual, while 13 percent have taken this work completely online.

An increasingly important aspect of the digitisation process is Robotic Process Automation. By automating repetitive manual tasks, the technology is saving a huge amount of time for businesses that can be reinvested into tasks that add more value. Organisations can realize cost savings and guarantee higher service levels, because of this 24/7 support. However, 38 percent of respondents don’t know whether their organisation would benefit from the technology being introduced into the payroll function. That is a significant gap in understanding of what is already becoming a critical technology. Of the 44 percent of organisations that do think RPA will benefit payroll, the number one reason is that it delivers higher quality performance.

Jean-Luc Barbier continues, "By digitizing payroll and HR processes to the maximum, companies can gain valuable data-based insights that can help support their transformation. In addition, they must also invest in the continuous training of their employees. If not, there is a high risk that the benefits of the new technology will be completely lost."

A total of 158 payroll professionals responded to the survey conducted by the Global Payroll Association. 55% of the organisations that the respondents represented employed 2500 employees or more. APAC (Asia Pacific) EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) and the Americas were the pay regions cited by the respondents.

As the leading European player in Payroll and HR, SD Worx provides worldwide services in the areas of payroll, HR, legal support, training, automation, consultancy and outsourcing. It focuses on customer centricity, fully embraces digitisation and is committed to international growth. Today, more than 65,000 small and large organisations worldwide place their trust in SD Worx and its nearly 75 years' worth of experience.

The more than 4,150 employees at SD Worx operate in ten countries: Belgium (HQ), Germany, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, Netherlands, Austria, the UK and Switzerland. SD Worx performs the payroll calculations for around 4.6 million employees. It is the co-founder of the Payroll Services Alliance, a global strategic network of leading payroll companies that together handle 32 million payroll calculations.

SD Worx also offers staffing solutions in Belgium and the Netherlands since 2018 thanks to the acquisitions of Vio Group and Flexpoint Group. This entity has more than 450 employees and offers solutions in flexible and temporary employment, secondment, recruitment and selection, outplacement and career guidance. Altogether, it has 5,500 temps working for about 3,800 clients.

More info on: www.sdworx.com