How do Global Companies manage Payroll Expenses across the African Continent?

We have found a growing trend for global businesses with offices in multiple African countries to outsource their payrolls to one service provider.

It is often company policy that payrolls in foreign countries must be outsourced. This is mainly to ensure statutory compliance and to involve a third party in the process and thereby reducing the likelihood of irregularities. Traditionally global companies had to appoint many different service providers for this purpose.

Listed below are a couple of problems and challenges which arise:

– Communication with service providers is laborious and often “lost in translation”.
– It makes it challenging to apply standard company policies across different countries when dealing with different service providers.
– Interpretation of statutory requirements can often vary from one service provider to the other.
– Service providers use different payroll systems in different countries. This complicates the consolidation of workforce and payroll data across countries. Consolidation of payroll data into one “consolidation currency” e.g. US dollar or Euro becomes almost impossible.

The increasing popularity of cloud technology, which covers vast geographical areas e.g. the African continent, and the ability to localise payrolls on one platform, allows global businesses to appoint a single service provider to run payrolls for all countries across Africa. This creates significant efficiencies and addresses all the challenges referred to above.

We expect that this will become the future norm, not only in Africa but across the globe.