Access to a global workforce expands your talent pool — but paying everyone can pose a challenge. You need to juggle compliance with tax and employment regulations in multiple countries, all while managing the many other administrative aspects of payroll.
Cloud-based payroll platforms are designed to alleviate this problem. They make it quick and simple to manage international payroll and scale alongside your organization.
In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of using cloud-based payroll software, and discuss some of the things to look for when selecting a payroll partner.
So let’s dive right in.
8 advantages of payroll software
If you have team members in multiple countries — and even if you don’t — cloud-based payroll can be a game-changer for business owners. Here’s how:
1. It centralizes employee data
A global payroll system — like Remote’s — collates all relevant data in one central hub. This makes it easier for your HR and payroll teams to track everything and ensure your team members are paid on time.
It also makes it easier to retrieve data, view analytics in real time, and generate payroll reports without navigating multiple systems. As a result, it becomes far quicker and easier to make decisions and answer queries.
2. It cuts costs
Cloud-based software of any kind can significantly reduce costs across numerous business areas. For instance:
It lessens the need to invest in IT infrastructure. This saves you having to purchase and store equipment, as well as hire people to manage it.
It lets you cut down on paper-based processes. This means spending less on paper, printing, ink, and similar items.
It alleviates the need for physical server storage or space. Downsizing your physical office space can save your business a lot of money.
It does this in countries all across the world, reducing the risk of legal penalties and other issues — and allowing you to focus on running and growing your business.
4. It reduces workloads
Cloud-based payroll software automates many of the manual tasks that typically occupy payroll teams, such as:
Calculating taxes
Generating payslips
Moving tasks along workflows
Automation reduces manual errors, as well, which increases accuracy and lowers the chances of employees being under or overpaid. By extension, this increases job satisfaction among your workforce.
“For any business, poorly-run payroll impacts retention, sentiment, and motivation. Those are all really big. It doesn't matter that you pay your employees well if you’re not paying them correctly.”
Jonathan Goldsmith, GM of Global Payroll at Remote
With fewer manual tasks and errors to worry about, your payroll team can also focus on more strategic tasks instead, such as:
Analyzing data and reporting
Improving processes
Training and development
5. It makes it easier to stay updated
Cloud-based payroll providers handle software updates, reducing the need for your IT team to perform software or hardware updates. As with your payroll team, this frees up time and resources for your people to focus on more strategic issues.
These automatic updates may even come with new features and tutorials. As a result, you’ll always have cutting-edge features to improve your processes without having to build and implement them yourself.
6. It scales with your company
Cloud-based payroll plans should be scalable with your company’s growth. If you want to expand into new markets and hire talent in different countries, Remote supports that growth and ensures that you don’t have to rethink your plans or search for a new provider.
Conversely, if you need to cut back, a cloud-based plan enables you to downsize as necessary and optimize your ROI.
7. It is accessible from anywhere
Cloud-based payroll tech enables real-time access from anywhere. At a minimum, this means a laptop, although some payroll platforms are accessible on a mobile browser or even through a mobile app.
This is convenient for both businesses and employees. Your team can manage payroll from any location, while your employees can view their pay information, submit expense reports, and use an employee self-service portal on their smartphones.
8. It improves data protection
Cloud-based providers invest in state-of-the-art security, as they are responsible for many companies’ data. This means ISO-standard protections with regular security updates.
Cloud software providers also ensure data redundancy and backup, as well. Since data is in the cloud, disaster is less likely to compromise it — and you don’t have to maintain the backup infrastructure.
“Payroll providers like Remote can help organizations grow secure global teams, while also ensuring they are compliant with local and international data protection laws in the markets they operate in. This frees them to focus on managing and growing their business.”
Marcelo Lebre, co-founder and CTO at Remote
What to look for in a cloud-based payroll provider
There are many cloud-based payroll software options. Here are some key features to look out for when assessing potential partners:
Our platform also tracks time and attendance to ensure your people are getting paid correctly and using their allotted amount of leave.
Integrations
Your payroll software should integrate seamlessly with your other HR tools. This allows data to flow between systems, reducing manual work and streamlining the entire process.
In particular, your payroll platform should integrate with:
Accounting software: Payroll info flows to your company books, impacting the correct accounts and ledgers for increased accuracy and faster closing. Remote’s payroll platform integrates with numerous accounting tools.
HR tools: This is a great way to streamline your HR processes and save your team repetitive and manual tasks. As well as offering integrations with leading HR platforms, Remote provides an all-in-one global HR platform that enables you to hire, onboard, and pay talent anywhere in the world, as well as provide key benefits and manage their day-to-day HR needs..
APIs: These are helpful if you want or need to build custom integrations. Remote provides a powerful API .
Free trials or demos
As with any software, it’s important to try before you buy. Look for platforms with free trials, or pre-purchase, sales-led demos that shorten the learning curve and give you an in-depth picture.
Strong customer support
Your payroll provider should have a robust, active support network, not just during the sales and onboarding phase, but during day-to-day operations too.
Ensure that customer service is available 24/7 through multiple channels, such as:
Phone support
Live chat / instant messaging
Email
Social media
Look for providers that also enable you to self-serve answers through an easy-to-navigate knowledge base or FAQ section.
Contractor management solutions
If you also work with independent contractors, it can be tricky to manage payments alongside your employee payroll. And when you’re dealing with various legal frameworks across multiple countries, it can become outright confusing.
This is why it’s advisable to work with a partner that can simplify and handle both. Remote lets you use our Contractor Management tool to onboard, manage, and pay contractors compliantly (and in multiple currencies), ensuring that all your employees and contractors are tracked and managed through one platform.
Maximize your advantages with a payroll solution for your business's specific needs
Depending on where your employees are located, it’s important to implement payroll software that meets their (and your) needs. For example, if you employ people all over the world (or have independent contractors based in different countries), it can be difficult to keep track of all the tax regulations and currencies in each location. Look for payroll software that can do this for you.
You also want to choose a system that works for the size of your business. If you have a small company, pick a more affordable option while you’re just getting started. But if you’re looking to grow, find software that can easily scale as you hire more and more employees.
If you already have a fairly large company, it’s even more advantageous to use technology that can consolidate hiring and payroll into one system. But you may want to choose systems that can easily integrate into your already existing technology so that it’s easy to ramp up your new software.
Payroll software vs. manual payroll
If your business still uses manual methods for payroll, you may be wondering how they are different from an automated system. Let’s dive in.
How does manual payroll processing work?
Manual payroll involves figuring out all aspects of payroll (including tax filings, wages, PTO, and bonuses) by hand. This means your employees or HR enters information into spreadsheets and calculates final numbers by hand, potentially in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.
HR employees are also generally responsible for adhering to local tax laws and regulations when dealing with a global workforce. Plus, they usually approve and distribute paychecks by hand, whether that’s done in person or through the mail.
How does manual payroll compare to cloud-based payroll software?
There are a few pros to using a manual system for your payroll. It can be less expensive this way in some cases since you don’t have the expense associated with paying for software.
However, you may be paying in other ways, such as hiring more HR employees and taking up more of their time with payroll tasks and dealing with mistakes . But on the flip side, you don’t need to train your employees to learn new software if you use a manual process.
For most businesses, a manual system is not a good fit. If you have more than a handful of team members, tracking employee data securely is difficult. There’s also the risk of human error and the increased workload.
Here are the reasons why most companies opt for payroll software.
Unorganized employee data: When you have many HR employees using a variety of different spreadsheets, it’s easy for payroll information to become scattered. This can slow everyone down, especially when payroll data needs to be synced up with other departments.
Human errors: Almost all payroll tasks are subject to human error when you use a manual system. This includes adhering to tax laws in various countries, paying employees the correct amount, and withholding taxes accurately.
Increased workload for your employees: We mentioned that a manual system can mean more work for your HR employees. But it can also require more labor from the rest of your workforce, as it may be complicated and confusing to complete tasks like requesting time off.
Making changes becomes difficult: Whenever a change occurs, whether it’s a policy change within your organization or a modification to tax regulations in a certain country, adapting is more difficult with a manual system. It becomes especially complicated when you deal with the ever-changing policies in multiple different countries.
Less secure information: Just like cloud-based providers are usually secure options, manual spreadsheets generally aren’t. If you work for a global company, you may have to regularly email Excel sheets back and forth between employees all over the world, which can put you at risk for a data breach.
How cloud-based payroll software has helped real businesses
By now, you know all about the advantages of payroll software. But let’s take a look at how these systems have been used to help real businesses achieve their goals.
Health and wellness startup Reverse Tech effectively scaled global operations
Reverse Tech , a company that helps brands in the health and wellness space grow, used Remote to position itself for sustainable growth in the global health market. Reverse Tech sought to scale its global business operations while staying compliant with international labor laws on five continents. However, its previous setup made it difficult to remain compliant all over the world.
Here’s how Reverse Tech benefited by partnering with Remote for payroll:
The Reverse Tech finance manager’s ability to effectively manage payroll for employees and contractors in multiple countries significantly increased.
The finance manager can now view monthly, semi-monthly, and hourly invoices in bulk for different currencies in countries all over the world. From there, they can easily ensure these invoices are accurate and correctly pay out the company’s employees and contractors.
Because payroll tasks are now managed with increased accuracy, Reverse Tech’s finance manager can spend less time handling them manually.
It’s now much simpler for Reverse Tech to stay up-to-date on payroll and tax laws in different countries.
Throughout the payroll software transition, employee satisfaction at Reverse Tech remained high, since Remote provided ample support.
Remote conducted a full workforce compliance audit to look for possible misclassification risks.
AI development company HomeProject easily paid 200 new global hires
HomeProject, a service that collects data for AI development from Nordic and European locations, needed to quickly hire 200 people for an upcoming project. It required accurate invoicing routines that it could count on, and the ability to easily pay people in multiple currencies once the project was complete.
Here’s how HomeProject benefited by partnering with Remote for payroll:
Before partnering with Remote, it was difficult for HomeProject to figure out how to pay hires in different currencies and countries. Without using Remote’s global payroll system, the company wouldn’t have been able to scale as quickly or efficiently.
But with Remote, HomeProject quickly adapted payments to meet each contractor’s needs. It paid out wages in one currency, and through the system, contractors were able to pick which currency they wanted to receive their payment in.
By using this type of automated payment system, HomeProject avoided transaction and foreign currency fees.
HomeProject could easily see a high-level overview of its payments to its contractors.
Without Remote’s help, HomeProject would have needed to hire five to six full-time employees to manage compliance, invoices, accounting, and payments for this project. It saved time and money using a payroll system instead.
Cloud-based payroll with Remote
Remote’s secure cloud-based payroll solution does all of these things and more, with our platform allowing you to:
Consolidate and automate 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
We do all the heavy lifting for you, allowing you to focus your time, money, and resources on growing and running your business. If you’re in charge of a global company, Remote can help you manage payroll, taxes, and compliance through one streamlined system. You can stay up-to-date with local tax laws and pay out all your employees in the right currency, without worrying about hiring more help.
