Immedis – Global payroll meets strategic analytics

Immedis addresses the myriad pains found in executing global payroll and then moves to leverage the rich data found across the enterprise. Read on for their key insights.

UNLEASH Product Spotlights look at products across the HR technology spectrum. Based on our research and member input, we look at HR technology involved throughout the employee lifecycle. Today, we look at the global payroll platform Immedis.

Immedis is on a mission to deliver truly touchless global payroll. We are driven by experience, tested technology, a spirit of relentless innovation, and accessible knowledge.”

Ruairi Kelleher, CEO Immedis

Let’s face it; payroll is still a struggle

Decades ago, HR technology emerged in its initial form: payroll processing. The time and effort required to process employee wages, deliver paychecks on time, and remain compliant created what has evolved into the now thriving HR technology market. Over the years, there have been significant advancements in payroll technology in the core HR systems that deliver it. Still, there remains one persistent truth in HR: The more complex your business, the more likely it is that payroll is a struggle. And the battle is recurring weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly for you. If your business is global, you’ve got the most complexity and likely even greater struggles.

Distributed work is the future, and that time is now

In 2005 Thomas Friedman announced “The World is Flat” in his award-winning business book of the same name about global business becoming a level playing field with anyone competing having an equal opportunity. Tech transformation and the shift to service and knowledge-based economies have accelerated the distribution of the workforce globally. An HRWins/UNLEASH international survey of employers conducted pre-COVID found that 54% offered some form of distributed work model. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend and demonstrated that work could not only be managed remotely and across borders, but productivity can increase at the same time. 94% of employers surveyed by Mercer during COVID stated productivity was the same or higher than pre-pandemic levels. It seems inevitable that large global businesses will become even more global, and growing companies will find talent and compete where the business opportunities present themselves. Deloitte reports that half of all employers have a global payroll strategy.

Global payroll brings more significant challenges

All payroll struggles with compliance and controls, data accuracy, and the integration of multiple data sources. Global payroll adds additional obstacles to the mix:

• Tax withholding calculations with a  mobile workforce. A challenge in a “normal” year, as the pandemic put employees on the move, sometimes crossing borders, to work remotely from their desired location, this issue has been amplified for HR leaders. As the workforce continues to be both more agile and mobile, employers need systems that can adapt.
• Local payroll tax reporting and compliance. Multinationals looking for growth tend to spend time in emerging markets. These tend to be the same markets where tax law changes at a local level can take place sporadically and without warning, but not without severe financial liability for employers. Employers must be confident in their tax reporting and compliance.
• Transparency and reporting. The ability to operate globally is dependent on visibility to analytics and reporting that can be standardized on one currency and help identify fluctuations in tax burdens and headcount with the confidence of data accuracy. However, payroll data isn’t just a matter of day-to-day operations. This data is increasingly crucial to business strategy for the global employer. Pay transparency and modeling, daily and on-demand pay programs, accurate earnings data contributing to employee financial wellness programs are just a few of the trends requiring the business to have better accuracy and transparency into global pay data.

Observations on the Immedis Solution

As we looked at Immedis, we expected to see a global payroll solution that helped execute payroll in a compliant manner while adding efficiency and accuracy for a global business. Getting this right is a massive improvement for any global enterprise. What found was that and more.

The Immedis cloud platform is currently supported in more than 150 countries and is GDPR compliant and ISO 27001 and SOC certified. The secret may be in Immedis’ implementation model. Executing payroll processing in the USA, UK, and Ireland and becoming an intelligent layer across your HR  and payroll systems and service providers globally. Important distinctions for CHROs and CIOs interested in security, privacy, and scale of the HR tech they implement.

For the day-to-day payroll processing and reporting, Immedis presents via a beautiful dashboard – a heatmap of the globe showing an easy-to-understand, up-to-the-minute current status of processing success, workings, and errors. Immedis is integrated with most all major payroll tech and service providers, and drilling into the dashboard reveals a real-time data sync of changes made in the Immedis data layer back to the payroll/HCM/HRIS platform.

As we looked more closely at errors and warnings presented to the user by Immedis, we noticed it wasn’t just flagging errors but providing guidance on the fix needed and the interface to make the change directly and communicate the changes back to the employee and the line of business.

The system provides all of the expected calendar-based workflows and reports at the payslip, gross to net, time period, department, business, and regional/country levels. It also provides views into General Ledger accounting that would make the CFO proud.

These features are effective in establishing Immedis as a strategic partner in the global payroll process. We’re sure the ROI on time saved and efficiencies gained, improved employee relations, service delivery, and resulting employee experience would make the business case. However, it was the analytics that took the value to another level altogether.

Immedis holds a position in the HR tech stack as a seamlessly integrated global payroll command center providing rich analytics. The integrated data from business and HR systems allows them to track critical employee data and demographics, and its ability to deliver rich people analytics across a global enterprise jumped off the screen as we viewed insights on leavers and joiners, pay equity, and modeling that we’ve never before seen in an HCM or HRIS platform.

A global ecosystem of payroll expertise

Immedis has also invested in establishing an exclusive network of global payroll processing providers and in-country local tax advisors. Not just partners in going to market, but partners in delivering quality and compliance to the customer. The partners are managed and measured as such. Immedis also takes contractual responsibility for compliance, based on its ability to manage the network and the data.

Payroll data is rarely included in strategic decision-making. The Immedis Platform is changing this giving every organization the ability to harness actionable insights through a powerful and unique global payroll analytics dashboard. Customers can now identify any business risks and quickly see any discrepancies that arise.

Ruairi Kelleher, CEO Immedis

A glimpse at Immedis’ product roadmap reveals more innovation in global payroll and analytics coming fast. They’re leaning into AI-based data validation, pay benchmark analytics, financial wellness, and features that will contribute to employee experience and communications.

Employers looking to do more than get payroll right but leverage payroll and HR data for business strategy and employee experience should add Immedis to their shortlist of companies to take a closer look at.

Find out more about the Immedis Perpetual Validation tool here.