Irish company Payslip taking the pain out of payroll for companies around the world

Mayo-based Irish company Payslip has been making strong strides in the Nordic region recently, harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to help companies with an international footprint to streamline and harmonise their payroll procedures. 

Started in Westport by Fidelma McGuirk in 2016, the company has worked closely with Enterprise Ireland to develop its international business and it now has offices as far afield as the U.K, Spain, Bulgaria and the U.S. 

Fidelma’s experience with other multinational companies prior to setting up Payslip made her acutely aware of the difficulties such entities have when it comes to managing the monthly payroll process across borders and regions, with different tax codes, reporting obligations, as well as methods of data collection and payments. 

Added to that was a reliance on manual data input and spreadsheets that demanded enormous amounts of time and resources each month, all while increasing the risk of human error. 

With that in mind, Fidelma started Payslip to remove as many of those barriers as possible by creating a platform that would do the heavy lifting on their behalf, leaving companies and integrated local providers to concentrate on “last-mile” implementation locally. 

“The mindset is that if something can be repeated, it can be automated, and payroll is a repeatable process that happens the exact same way, every single month,” Aoife Flynn, Chief Marketing Officer at Payslip, says. 

“Payslip is a global payroll control platform - we're essentially a software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology for running global payroll operations for multinational organisations. Typically, our clients would be large multinationals who are in at least five international locations - when you go to that level of five or more international offices, payroll becomes a really big pain point, particularly across Europe where every country has their own compliance, regulations, nuances, legislation, and so on.”

The Nordic region has been a particular focus area in recent times, and the recent onboarding of Swedish global investment firm EQT showcased how Payslip’s solution can help Scandinavian companies with a global presence.

With EQT keen to standardise and automate as much of its payroll process as possible, Payslip came in and implemented their solution, integrating with existing human capital management platform Workday and rapidly rolling it out in 29 countries over a period of nine months. 

“It is really great to have one process that looks the same in each of our payroll countries and thanks to Payslip, all our employees, no matter where they are have the same experience accessing their payslips in Workday- it’s a really good user experience” says Stefan Hjerne, Head of Payroll and Benefits at EQT Group. 

An evaluation of the Payslip rollout at EQT has revealed a time saving of 40 percent compared to the previous payroll process, with some 720 hours per year saved on reconciliations. The process can be audited at any time and there were no third-party implementation costs involved. 

“What we've done is we've automated the flow of data in and out of human capital management HCM) systems, where payroll data is held, and back out to payroll providers and house it all centrally in Payslip, which means it's secure, you're not emailing data back and forth,” Aoife explains. 

Payslip has integrated almost 300 payroll service providers and automates the payslips of around a quarter of a million employees, covering around US$2 billion in salary to date for companies such as Olympus, Stripe and Booking.com. 

“Because it's automating all of that work, our platform is reducing the index errors and we also have built-in validations inside of it, so we pick up those errors and then we can use AI analyse the errors that were found and suggest fixes,” Aoife says. 

Having originally aimed at large American companies as their target market, Payslip is increasingly focused on Europe, and in particular the Nordic region, as it continues to grow. 

“For us, Europe is a key market because companies can get to the size of 2000 or 3000 employees, and suddenly there are they're already in four or five international locations,” Aoife says. 

“I would say the Nordic nations in particular have a really good tech mindset there, and the type of companies we target have that tech mindset - they have a solution and a challenge, and they're looking for a technology to solve it.

“They are the type of clients that like to use their own local payroll providers and fully believe that, at the end of the day, payroll is local and you need the best-in-class people on the ground to be running the payroll, but you also need a technology to manage it at a central level.”

Aoife says that the support offered by Enterprise Ireland has been very important to Payslip’s success, and she expects it to continue to be a big factor as they continue to grow and expand. 

“Enterprise Ireland has been involved since the very beginning - we were on the accelerator programme and we have had a development advisor who has been really influential. The support in terms of help with companies, introductions to companies and getting feedback from advisors in the local Enterprise Ireland offices around the world has been invaluable.”