How Lano manages payroll for a global IT enterprise across 9 entities

With entities in 9 different countries and operating in 12 markets, our client relies on the services of 11 different payroll providers to process payroll for their global team across various employment types. Although the team chose reliable in-country partners to manage payroll, there is a lack of clear high-level oversight from one market to the next creating a fragmented flow of information and data.

These partners leverage their local knowledge and ensure compliance; however, managing and consolidating data streams quickly became complicated and time consuming for their business. In the past, the client received payroll data that contained different data formats and discrepancies in the reporting across each provider. This lack of standardized data made it hard to bring their global workforce information together to form a reliable basis for analysis and business decision-making.

The internal processes were manual and labor intensive with 9 finance managers managing payroll in various platforms. Depending on the market and the tooling, some platforms integrated with their BI, HRIS, and ERP software to ease things, however most still provided manual challenges that the company wanted to avoid. The People Operations team used spreadsheets to manage monthly changes. Having to manually export data from the HRIS system, analyze the data, and then upload it to the various payroll platforms which lacked consistency across formatting and required data, made this a work-intensive, time consuming process.

The company chose to use Lano for Payroll Consolidation to standardize, centralize, and automate their global payroll operations. This meant bringing in all the data from multiple formats from their existing payroll providers into a single platform, creating a single source of truth for all employee payroll data without having to switch partners. As they expand into more markets and work with Lano’s Payroll Partners, the same process applies, giving them clean data to work with every month within the same platform they are already familiar with. This approach creates an enriched, standardized payroll data repository and avoids ever having to worry about data fragmentation again.

Operationally, the first step was to start with the integration of one payroll partner - in this case, the service provider for the Portuguese entity. Lano analyzed both the input and output data flows to and from the Portuguese provider and quickly defined a mapping logic to import and export information through their platform. 

Once the integration of the first payroll provider was successfully completed, Lano then repeated the same process with the other service providers. At the same time, the Lano team integrated the client’s HRIS, Accounting, and Finance systems with the Lano platform to enable smooth data exchanges via API. As a final step, Lano facilitated the integration with the business’s ERP system to set up the direct transfer of relevant payroll data to the Finance team.