Product Updates — 5 min

Benefits and expenses: New ways Remote helps you pay employees beyond their salary

Written by Joana Viana

April 2, 2021

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As an industry leader in global employment and payroll, we’re excited to share details on a few recent updates to the Remote platform that give you even more flexibility in how you pay employees for extras beyond their salary.

We know salary is only one piece of the payroll puzzle for most companies. That’s why earlier this year, we rolled out two new capabilities — Expenses and Incentives — that empower our customers to use Remote as a one-stop-shop for all their employee payments, from salary deposits to expense reimbursements to special incentive payouts.

Jump straight to a key chapter

Paying employees beyond their salary
Frequently asked questions about benefits and expenses
Unlock employee happiness with Remote

Paying employees beyond their salary

Whether your HR team is one person wearing many hats or a robust center of excellence with multiple divisions, the payroll process can get challenging quickly. Often, we hear that our customers have used multiple platforms for different types of remittances to cobble payments together manually. Yikes!

With our new expense and incentive features, Remote streamlines every aspect of the payroll process. No more logins to multiple accounts. No more complicated spreadsheets. You can easily approve expenses and pay out bonuses, commissions, and more in seconds.

In a nutshell, we’ve integrated the ability to reimburse expenses and pay commissions, bonuses, stipends, allowances, and other one-time payments outside of salary, right into our payroll platform.

Here’s how it works:

You log into Remote. From the expenses area, you can review, approve, deny, or check the status of reimbursement invoices submitted by employees.

From the incentives area, you can pay out custom bonuses, commissions, allowances, and stipends with just a few clicks.

It’s that easy! And of course, you can also manage your regular payroll, approve time off requests, and pay contractors without leaving your browser.

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Frequently asked questions about benefits and expenses

We know getting payroll right is top of mind for our customers, so we take enhancements to Remote’s platform seriously.

Can you schedule incentive payments for the future?

Yep. When adding an incentive payment in Remote, you just have to specify the payroll month to apply the payment. You can choose to pay the employee as soon as possible or schedule the payment for a later paycheck. However, all expenses and incentive payments must be submitted by the 10th of the month in order to be paid to employees during that month.

Can you pay employees in their local currency?

We’re one step ahead of you. Remote is set up to automatically detect the employee’s local currency, so you will see that currency reflected when submitting the incentive form.

Can you see past payments made to employees?

Absolutely! You can quickly track your payment status, view scheduled payments, and review past payments made to employees any time in the Remote platform.

Unlock employee happiness with Remote

Salaries are obviously critical, but a paycheck is just one reason your employees stay with your company. Team culture, advancement opportunities, and perks are also big motivators.

Luckily, you don’t have to settle on a one-size-fits all plan to give your team the extras they want. With Remote, you can pay employees for bonuses, commissions, allowances, and stipends, as well as make one-time payments to employees for things like office supplies, ergonomic chairs, unused time off reimbursements, referral rewards, and any other incentives unique to your organization.

Say you want to give your software developer in Florida a monthly flip-flop fund or your sales rep in Colorado a monthly beanie bankroll. You can set up both by selecting the “Other” category under the incentives payment and adding the notes to the form. Customizations like these provide flexibility so you can quickly and easily apply the perks that best meet the needs of your individual employees.

These new releases build on important product enhancements fueled by direct customer feedback to help us simplify the global HR process. But we’re not done yet! Stay tuned as we continue to automate away the complexities of payroll, compliance, and benefits workflows for your business.