In this article, we'll explore how an efficient payroll control framework can help you achieve compliant global payroll. But before we dive into smart controls, you first need to understand your organization’s risk profile by considering the following:
- Risk appetite: Willingness to take risks in operations
Is there clarity across your entire scope in order to ensure compliance in all jurisdictions?
- Risk capacity: Ability to take risks
Is your organization in the position to consume potential fines or immaterial risk-related damage?
- Risk tolerance: Defined performance goals (e.g. KPIs)
What are the specific performance and compliance goals you are aiming to achieve?
An Effective Global Payroll Control Framework
The foundation to successfully managing compliant global payroll operations is having an effective control framework behind it. For which there are two design principles to consider:
Standardization and Consistency: Implementing globally standardized controls to mitigate key risks while allowing for local deployment. This consistency ensures that your payroll operations remain audit-ready, at all times.
Accountability: Ensuring you’re not outsourcing processes to avoid accountability. Committing to ensuring compliance at the local level, regardless of whether your payroll is handled in-house or outsourced. Because either way, you are still responsible for ensuring compliance.
Risk Management in Global Payroll
The ongoing process of risk management looks like this:
And here are some examples of how we can follow this process to review and respond to potential operational risks.
Control Management in Global Payroll
Designing controls within the global payroll process is an art in itself. Which is why we often get the question: Where do we start?
With our two key design principles in mind, the controls must allow for local deployment and ensure local compliance, which means they should be flexible by design.
In order to achieve that, you'll need to consider: Are your controls...?
- Aligned with specific desired objectives and outcomes
- Classified as key or operational
- Designed to be detective or preventative
- Executed manually, automated, or IT-dependent
- Owned and operated by designated individuals or teams
- Implemented in stages and timing tied to payroll processes
- Adapted to local thresholds and data points
Controls across all Global Payroll Workflow stages
Your global payroll workflow can be divided into three stages: pre-payroll, run payroll, and post-payroll. Take a look at this global payroll control framework, each stage of the workflow has its own set of controls which ensure accuracy and compliance.
In order to ensure that the right people have the right access to the right information, these controls need to be role-based, with a clear payroll cycle segregation of duties. And above all, you must be audit-ready at all times.
So how can you achieve this with technology?
With a global payroll control framework which allows you to efficiently operate and evidence your controls across your entire global payroll landscape. This platform should be vendor and service-level agnostic, in order to enable you to review more payrolls in more countries with less time and without relying solely on spreadsheets.
Here are some of the ways you can enable smart controls with Payzaar’s global payroll automation platform:
Operations Control:
- Centralized global payroll management with real-time tracking
- Streamlined workflow tracking for payroll changes, approvals, and compliance
- Collaboration with payroll providers and colleagues, reducing email reliance
- Full audit trail for instructions, messages, and data
- Cycle-agnostic (e.g., weekly, monthly, off-cycle)
Variance Tracking
- Tracks interperiod variances with flexible comparison periods
- Visualizes differences between pay cycles at both total and employee levels
- Allows detailed analysis by drilling down to specific pay elements and time periods
- Optional data export for deeper analysis
- Cycle-agnostic (e.g., weekly, monthly, off-cycle)
Threshold Monitoring
- Easily checks inter-period variances against tolerance levels ($ and %)
- Visualizes changes between pay cycles based on predefined criteria per pay group
- Focuses on high-risk pay elements and zooms in on those meeting threshold criteria
- Optional data export for deeper analysis
- Vendor-agnostic and cycle-agnostic
Data Validation
- Automatically highlights differences between input and G2N output
- Eliminates manual error searches, allowing focused error fixing
- Enhances accuracy and reduces checking time
- Features smart search for specific employees and pay elements
- Provides a comprehensive audit trail for review, rejection, and approval processes with customizable review levels (e.g., analyst, manager)
If you want to achieve 100% audit-readiness, 100% of the time, book a demo with our team today to find out how Payzaar’s global payroll control framework can help you unlock compliant payroll management across your entire global landscape.
For a more in depth breakdown of the different controls across all the global payroll workflow stages, you can also check out our full webinar on smart controls for global compliance here:
