Benefits of global payroll: what growth companies need to know

As a growth-focused business, the ability to hire beyond your borders is key. It enables you to save on costs, broaden your diversity, and gain access to top talent — no matter where they reside.

But managing payroll for a distributed workforce can be daunting. As well as running the administrative processes, there are multinational tax and labor laws to get to grips with, with the lingering threat of fines and penalties if you get it wrong.

By implementing a dedicated global payroll solution, you can easily overcome these issues, and ensure that your payroll is streamlined, easy to manage, and — crucially — fully compliant.

Here’s how a global payroll solution can make your life easier, and help drive your company’s growth.

What is global payroll?

When you employ people in different countries, paying them is only part of the process. You also need to manage their taxes, and adhere to the labor laws of their country. All of these things are part of global payroll.

Specifically, you need to:

• Calculate salaries

• Ensure payments are on time

• Track and report payments

• Distribute payslips

• Withhold and pay taxes

• Comply with local labor laws

To learn more about what global payroll entails — and what your responsibilities are — check out our dedicated guide:

Global HR —

21 min

What is global payroll?

Learn the details of global payroll operations and find out how global payroll providers can help you start hiring fast in the international market.

What are the benefits of global payroll?

For a growth business with limited resources, it can be hugely difficult to manage all of these tasks. As well as the administrative burden, you must also comply with local legislation across multiple countries, and ensure the integrity and security of sensitive personal and financial data. In most cases, this simply isn’t practical.

As a result, it’s widely recommended to outsource your global payroll operations. This allows you to save time and money, and provide a more clinical experience for your employees. 

Here are some of the key ways a global payroll solution can help.

It avoids the need to open new entities

To hire and pay people in different countries, companies are often required to set up new entities in those locations. This is usually a cumbersome, complex, and costly process.

By using a single global payroll platform, you avoid the need to do this. Your payroll partner handles all the heavy lifting for you, mitigating your compliance risk and reducing your overhead costs significantly.

See how Remote's dedicated payroll solutions can transform your global HR approach.

It saves time

A global payroll solution automates many of the manual, time-consuming tasks usually associated with in-house payroll, such as tax calculations, foreign currency exchange, and compliance reporting. As well as saving time, this reduces the risk of errors or inaccuracies, and helps ensure that your employees are paid promptly and accurately — wherever they are based.

A strong global payroll solution — like the one offered by Remote — also features integrations with other software, such as specialist accounting tools or enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs.

It saves money

One of the biggest cost savings of a global payroll solution is that you can stay compliant without having to invest in in-house resources. With Remote, for example, our local, in-house experts monitor any legislative changes and adjust your payroll accordingly, saving you some pretty hefty legal and administrative costs.

As well as giving you peace of mind, this approach enables you to focus on the other growth elements of your business.

Time savings often have a downstream effect on cost, too. For instance, by mitigating the risk of errors and inaccuracy, you also mitigate the risk of non-compliance, which can lead to financial penalties.

It maintains compliance

As mentioned, compliance is a huge part of international payroll — and also one of the most complex. But with a global payroll solution, all of your country-specific compliance obligations are taken care of, from holiday entitlements and overtime calculations, to social insurance contributions and withholding obligations.

A reliable global payroll service will also keep track of changes to tax laws, employment regulations, and data privacy requirements, and implement them automatically into your ongoing payroll operations.

This keeps everything running smoothly, and removes the need to find and hire local law and tax firms.

It's simple to integrate

You can integrate your global payroll solution with the rest of your HR tech stack, allowing you to streamline payroll processes and boost efficiency. These integrations can ease your international growth and ensure you stay compliant with local regulations, reducing your paperwork and improving your budget planning.

Your employees can also benefit from this, making it easier for them to access their payslips and manage other HR tasks.

It enables faster global expansion

Both fast-growing and established international companies need to be able to expand and hire quickly, and global payroll software allows you to do that.

Much of the onboarding (and, indeed, offboarding) process is automated, requiring only basic user input. This means you can hire at scale and continue to expand rapidly, all while remaining fully compliant across the globe.

Data is centralized

As we’ve discussed, global payroll is a big, complex beast. With a capable global payroll platform, the whole thing is simplified and easy to manage.

By centralizing everything into one global payroll hub, you can streamline your payroll processes and ensure a consistent approach in every country. It also makes it easier to protect and secure your sensitive data, and track and report everything with ease.

It improves employee satisfaction

Accurate and timely payment is a core expectation for all your employees, no matter where they are based. If their payslips are wrong or late, it can cause friction and negatively affect employee satisfaction — which can create even bigger problems down the line.

Global payroll software ensures that this doesn’t happen. It provides clear guidance on salary handling and legislative requirements across the globe, helping you to avoid mistakes. Helpful features (like Remote’s multi-currency support) also help to minimize confusion and potential conflict, ensuring that your employee relationships remain positive.

A reliable global payroll solution doesn’t just make administration and compliance easier: it can contribute to a positive company culture, make your employees happier, and even help boost retention.

How can Remote help?

Remote’s global payroll solutions are designed with all of these things in mind, with our platform allowing you to:

• Consolidate and streamline your payroll processing

• Minimize your administrative tasks

• Ensure compliance with local labor laws

• Reduce payroll costs

• Make international payments and capital cash transfers

• Outsource tax deductions and returns

Remote does all this heavy lifting for you, allowing you to focus your time, money, and resources elsewhere.

To learn more about how your business can benefit from global payroll — and to see how you can set it all up — check out our dedicated guide below:

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Learn how to manage global payroll for your team and keep your company compliant with international labor laws.