The #1 global payroll mistake your company is making

• Suffering from unexpected payroll errors?

• Tired from having to manage your payroll and HR in multiple systems?

• Stressed out from having to submit payroll 30 days in advance of your next pay run?

It’s not just you: paying international employees and contractors is painful. What you might not realize is why. 

“Global payroll” and employer of record (EOR) companies aren’t what they seem. You, along with most companies around the world, are actually running payroll through a payroll aggregator. 

The hours of prep, the endless manual calculations, and the stress of unexpected errors—these are all payroll aggregator symptoms. 

If only there was a way to pay your employees and contractors overseas just as easily as you do at home…

3. You’re forced to submit payroll 7 to 30 days in advance of your next pay run.

Because payroll aggregators send your employee payroll data out to multiple third parties, they need your payroll data up to 30 days in advance. Shuttling your data back and forth takes time, and this puts your day-to-day operations under strain:  

• You want to issue bonuses, commissions, or reimbursements in between payroll submissions, but instead, you have to wait until the next pay cycle. If you submit a reimbursement even a single day after submitting payroll, your employee won’t get reimbursed until the next cycle…which could be up to 60 days later.

• When an employee leaves in the middle of a pay period, you’re stuck overpaying them—because once you’ve submitted payroll for that period, you can’t make any changes. Then you have to deal with the aftermath of getting the funds back (good luck with that).

4. You’re plagued by errors, delays, and issues.

When you use a payroll aggregator, without realizing it you’re putting your trust in hordes of operations staff who manually submit your pay runs in different systems. And when humans are shuttling data back and forth between systems, it’s never going to be 100% accurate. 

By stitching together third-party payroll vendors in other countries and manually transmitting your payroll files to them, payroll aggregators make you vulnerable to nasty breakouts of errors, delays, and other unexpected issues.

• Late payments. Manual data processing takes time and risks late payments, and that risk compounds as you scale your business. Whenever you expand to a new country, your payroll aggregator adds another third party into the mix, increasing the complexity and the likelihood of late payments.

• Over or under paying. When payroll aggregators transfer data back and forth manually between systems, one typo is all it takes to introduce an incorrect figure. Cue unhappy, underpaid employees, or trying to claw back the sum you’ve overpaid.

• Incorrect deductions. When benefits and retirement deductions aren’t directly integrated with the payroll system, there’s a high risk of critical information getting lost. This means they’ll deduct the wrong amount—forcing you to spend time chasing up errors and ensuring they’re fixed in the next pay run.

Finally, there’s the “silent killer”: hidden compliance risks that could hit you with a huge fine.

Payroll aggregators issue pay and generate employment contracts. That’s it.

They aren’t a global HRIS, so they aren’t capable of automating compliance beyond payroll and hiring.

• They don’t have time and attendance systems—so you're forced to use workarounds to support hourly workers. That means they can't help you prevent overtime violations.

• They don’t have learning management software—so you can’t use them to assign mandatory compliance training.

• They don’t build global compliance rules into their product—so if you accidentally give a contractor an hourly rate below the legal minimum, they’ll go right ahead and pay it out. 

This puts you at risk of overtime violations, minimum wage violations, training violations, and more—and the fines can be huge.

How to cure your global payroll aches and pains

Using a native global payroll system and globalized HRIS eradicates all payroll aggregator symptoms. You and your business will be feeling better in no time. 

Rippling is the first true "native" global payroll system. It’s a global HRIS that natively supports every facet of HR:

• You can finally manage all of your people, systems, and data around the world in a single system. It works like the very best payroll systems you’ve used in the US, but seamlessly includes employees in other countries as well.

• You can pay employees who work in different countries and tax jurisdictions in a single pay run. Just click “Submit” once—and Rippling calculates net pay and taxes in milliseconds, in our own tax engine. You never have to wait days to see this calculation, and every employee is paid in their local currency.

• You can run global payroll as easily as for employees in your own country, including hourly employees, off-cycle pay runs and, if you make a mistake, correcting historical pay runs. Plus, whenever you make a change in Rippling, like a raise, it immediately takes effect within payroll, scheduling or prorating as necessary.

• Rippling supports every stage of a company’s growth, so you won’t have to switch systems as you scale. In addition to our global payroll service, we also offer our own native employer of record (EOR) service, which allows you to hire employees globally without setting up your own local entities in a particular country. It’s built on top of our native payroll rails, which means that when the time comes, you can move employees from our EOR to your own local entity and continue using our Global Payroll services. With other EORs you’d need to rip out and replace systems to accomplish this.

See how Rippling can help with payroll

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