Want to improve the performance of your international payroll? Start by monitoring the global payroll metrics that matter.
KPIs and your international payroll
Continuous improvement is how you ensure your business grows. Continuous improvement applies to every element of your business, from product to service to staff development. And if you pay a global workforce through an international payroll, it applies to that too.
Yet before you can improve your global payroll, you need to know what to target – and benchmark your current situation. This is the value of key performance indicators (KPIs). With the right metrics, you can get under the skin of your international payroll and understand what to improve.
What are the top 5 KPIs for an international payroll?
There’s no set pack of metrics waiting to be applied to your payroll. As long as the KPI is well-defined and actionable (that is, it’s measuring something meaningful and you can do something with the results) any metric is on the table
1. Payment accuracy rate
As an international payroll services provider, payment accuracy is certainly our top KPI. In many ways it’s at the core of doing what we do. Managing an international payroll is complex and it’s all too easy for errors to creep in, which is why people choose to outsource their payroll.
While you can adopt an overarching accuracy KPI, you can also break that rate down by the most common error categories, such as missed deadlines, tax errors and pay miscalculations.
2. Error resolution in payroll
This KPI builds on the fact that the success of a payroll is measured not just in minimising errors but in ensuring that any errors that do slip through are rectified quickly and successfully.
Setting, for example, a two-day fix KPI can help ensure your performance is at the top end of industry performance.
It’s a vital metric if you outsource your international payroll processing. Yet there’s also value in using this KPI as an internal measure of performance where you process your own payroll, because the speed and effectiveness of resolution can be an indicator of service delivery standards and payroll team performance. This KPI can also greatly impact the morale of your international workforce.
3. Payroll processing time
Another KPI at the heart of the service we offer – because a key reason for outsourcing your international payroll should be to save time.
It’s important to measure this metric because an international payroll places additional stress on the payroll system as it grows. Expanding your operation overseas shifts the processing time needle to ‘more time consuming’. Outsourcing and/or making other process improvements shifts it back.
The aim should be for this metric to operate in tandem with the error rate. The ideal position is for a growing international operation to run payroll faster with fewer errors. KPIs will be vital in assessing whether this is happening.
4. Payroll cost
A payroll is a collection of assorted costs. There are the salaries you pay, and it’s worth measuring these to understand the total wage bill of the business.
Then there are the costs associated with running the payroll itself: the cost of processing the payroll in-house (that is, the staff cost of processing, the cost of software licences and other IT) or the cost of outsourcing.
For any organisation running its own international payroll it’s important to ensure that the expanding organisation doesn’t lead to a disproportionate spiralling of the cost of payroll processing.
5. Staff turnover costs
It’s increasingly difficult to retain talent, but as staff turnover increases for many organisations, your payroll can provide important data about the cost of turnover to the business.
Total and per-position turnover costs (which might include recruitment, induction, training etc) are important KPIs here, and can help you understand at a strategic level the investment required to bring in new recruits at various levels of the business.
Outsource your global payroll service to us, and let’s discuss the KPIs that can help drive your payroll performance up. Talk to us now