How an international Finance company streamlines their global payroll with Lano

Initially, the company had a fragmented international payroll landscape that was the result of a series of mergers and acquisitions. After taking over existing payroll vendors that were used by the old owning companies, they were working with five different ICPs to process payroll for their eight entities that were spread across eight different countries in Europe, North America, and Asia.

While three of them processed payroll with their own separate platform, two of them didn’t even have a real payroll system, but transferred payroll data with the help of emails and spreadsheets. The disparate payroll systems and the communication via spreadsheets and emails caused a lot of manual work for the payroll team who spent a lot of time communicating back and forth with vendors.

Another major drawback was the error frequency in payroll. Every month, the payroll team spent several hours on rectifying payroll mistakes on employee payslips and trying to make sense of the low-quality data they received from the two vendors that communicated via email. The only tool that was working seamlessly for them across all entities was their HRIS through which expenses, sick leaves, absences, promotions, and other contractual changes were managed.

Triggered by the internal challenges caused by the issues with their payroll providers and the additional work for the payroll team due to the number of payroll errors, the business decided to start searching for a unified global payroll platform that would allow them to manage all their processes, data, and countries in one place, achieve data transparency, and gain visibility of their global payroll operations.

The company had several requirements their ideal solution provider would have to meet to be a good fit. They wanted global coverage that not only included their current geographies, but also offered flexibility for future expansion projects. Flexibility regarding existing payroll providers was another key requirement, along with reliable customer support and proven expertise in global payroll management.

Additionally, the solution provider should have experience in handling payroll for enterprise clients in their industry and offer a unified platform that would provide a single source of truth for all their payroll data, with automated data checks and data flows to cut the number of payroll errors on payslips and put an end to spreadsheet exchanges. Ideally, the solution would integrate with their HRIS to synchronize data across systems and save time.

After comparing several global payroll providers, they decided to go with Lano. Their global coverage, the flexibility to accommodate different aspects of working in a global environment, and the ability to seamlessly integrate with the company’s HRIS tool ticked all the boxes, and the global network of experienced in-country payroll partners assured the company that Lano would be able to cater to all their country-specific requirements.

Also, their experience with enterprise clients, their willingness to provide custom solutions, and their hands-on approach to managing the global payroll transformation project left the company without any doubt that their global payroll would be in good hands.

The Lano team quickly came up with a global payroll strategy that would allow the business to accomplish all its objectives. They replaced the two payroll providers who had only very rudimentary systems with two providers from their partner network and connected the other three existing providers and the business’s HRIS to the Lano platform to automate data flows between the different systems, put an end to the formerly cumbersome, manual information sharing processes, and enable automated data checks for payroll.

The whole onboarding and implementation process was overseen by one of Lano’s project managers and the implementation was successfully completed according to the predefined project timeline. The business was not only satisfied with the provided solution, but also with the professionalism and dedication of the Lano team.

Lano’s global payroll consolidation platform was a great improvement to their global payroll workflows and processes. Built to support large numbers of employees, the Lano platform seamlessly enabled payroll processing for the 1,500 employees and provided the company with a formerly unknown ease of getting detailed, custom-built payroll reports that combined data from multiple providers. The automated payroll checks performed by the platform further made it much easier and faster for the payroll team to audit the payroll calculation results.

Thanks to the integration of their HRIS with Lano, employee PTO, sick leave, and other absences were automatically synchronized with the different payroll systems so that the ICPs can process payroll with accurate data input that reflects all the latest changes that affect payroll. The integration with their ERP system was an unexpected perk that added an additional time advantage.

With Lano, the business is now able to manage all their global payroll through one platform while benefiting from complete data synchronization with their HRIS. Payroll queries and related questions are promptly answered by the Lano team, with the first detailed response being available within one hour.