While much of the focus in multi-country payroll projects tends to fall on countries with the largest employee populations, managing small country populations can be an equally daunting prospect. Companies face a range of challenges in paying small numbers of employees across multiple countries, from managing their vendors to gaining visibility into controls and compliance.

While multinationals often set out looking for a single payroll delivery model, in practice, a host of complexities and idiosyncrasies mean that they usually end up with multiple providers using different delivery models, and based on different technology platforms. This paper assesses the practical realities – and associated costs – of those technology choices.

While Software as a Service (SaaS) is firmly established as an outsourcing model in HR and other business sectors, its impact on the multi-country payroll arena has been less widely recognized. But this is starting to change. SaaS delivery models offer a number of potential business benefits for international payroll – albeit with some inevitable caveats.

This Special Report examines the changing shape of the multi-country payroll sector, assessing trends and developments that impact the way organizations tackle the challenges of managing their international payroll operations.

Payroll plays a major role in helping manage the execution of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), but the issues it faces are not always understood elsewhere in the organization, particularly in international deals. This Briefing Paper provides insights into how payroll functions within different multinationals prepare for and manage the impact of M&As, from their highlevel strategy to the kinds of checklists they deploy.

Webster Buchanan’s Payroll Performance Scorecard is a set of tools designed to help Payroll, HR and finance managers and other senior executives measure payroll efficiency and effectiveness. Built on the experiences of leading payroll practitioners, it’s designed to give companies a better insight into how well they’re performing and where improvements can be made. At a time when payroll is under pressure to reduce costs, the Scorecard arms managers with the information they need either to make changes or justify the status quo.

Managing payroll across multiple countries in Eastern Europe presents a number of challenges, some common to any multi-country payroll project, others unique to the geographical environment. Using a proprietary research model that enables us to drill down into the individual challenges and concerns of participants, Webster Buchanan Research interviewed 11 senior managers with regional or global responsibility for payroll in Eastern Europe and discussed the issues they face and the way they have set out to tackle them. The participants work for multinationals of various sizes, from mid-sized to Fortune 500, and were drawn from a range of industry sectors.

With a mixture of emerging and booming economies, political uncertainty and instability and extreme contrasts in business confidence and fortunes, the 22 nations of Latin America can never be categorized as one homogenous whole. But for regional and global payroll managers, there are common challenges and opportunities – and as this research survey concludes, different kinds of demands on the senior payroll professional that may lead to a reassessment of the role of the regional payroll manager.