Payroll

What this category covers

Paying people correctly and on time, and satisfying whichever authority wants to know about it: calculation, deductions, filings, payslips and year-end documents.

This is the most jurisdiction-bound category in the catalogue. Rates, thresholds, contribution rules, filing routes and payslip contents are all local, and a product that is excellent in one country may not exist in another.

Employee records, contracts and absence sit in HR and recruiting. The ledger those payments post into is finance and accounting.

Country first, always

Filter by where you actually pay people before comparing anything else.

A payroll product has to know the local rules, keep up with changes to them, and connect to the local filing route. That work is expensive for vendors, which is why coverage maps are narrower than marketing suggests, and why one country in a list can mean full service while another means a spreadsheet you complete yourself.

Ask what happens when legislation changes mid-year. Automatic updates are the entire point, and a product where you adjust rates by hand has moved the risk back onto you.

Paying people in several countries

Three arrangements exist, and they differ in cost and obligation.

Running local payroll in each country means a legal entity, registration and either a local provider or a platform covering that market. It is the cheapest per person and the slowest to set up.

An employer of record employs the person on your behalf where you have no entity. It removes the registration problem entirely and charges a monthly fee per employee that is substantial compared with running payroll yourself.

Contractor payments are the third route, and the simplest until a tax authority decides the relationship looks like employment. Classification rules are tightening in many markets, so treat that risk as real rather than theoretical.

What the software has to handle

• Gross to net calculation, with local deductions and contributions.
• Filings, automatic where possible and clearly assisted where not.
• Payslips in the required format and language.
• Year-end documents, produced without a separate project.
• Corrections, since an error found in June concerns a run made in March.

Off-cycle runs deserve a question of their own. Final payments, bonuses and corrections rarely fall on the normal schedule, and some products charge for each one.

Connections that save real work

Payroll sits between the systems that record work and the systems that record money.

Hours from time tracking, absence from the HR system, and the resulting journal entries into accounting are the three connections worth having. Each removes a re-typing step, and re-typing is where payroll errors come from.

Ask how the accounting posting works in detail: whether it splits by department or cost centre, how employer contributions are represented, and whether a correction reverses cleanly rather than leaving two entries to reconcile.

Cost, accuracy and the switching question

Pricing is a base fee plus an amount per employee per month, with contractors sometimes charged less. Extra runs, year-end documents, corrections and support tiers are the common additions.

Compare on total annual cost for your headcount rather than the per-person figure, and ask about the minimum. Then ask what happens when someone leaves mid-month, since some products charge for the full period regardless.

Accuracy matters more than price here. A payroll error damages trust with staff immediately and with an authority slowly, and neither is repaired by a cheaper subscription. Switch at the start of a tax year where possible, and read what pricing pages hide for the habits that apply across the market.

What to check before signing

Three questions decide most of the outcome, and none of them appear on a comparison table.

Which filings are submitted automatically in your country, which are prepared for you to submit, and who is responsible when one is late. The answers differ by market even within one product.

How corrections work when an error is found after a run has been paid, including whether the fix appears in the current period or restates the previous one.

What support looks like at the end of a tax year, which is when the questions arrive and when response times matter most.

Ask for a named reference in your own country rather than a global case study. Payroll quality is local, and a vendor with an excellent reputation elsewhere tells you nothing about the market you actually operate in.