article / 7th Sep 2026
As more of your team sits outside the UK, payroll quietly gets harder to run. National Payroll Week is a good moment to check whether your setup has kept pace, or whether fragmented Global Payoll is costing you more than you realise.
A Lano X Tugela People article.
This week is National Payroll Week (7–11 September 2026), so payroll is having its moment in the spotlight. For any business that has grown beyond a single country, it is worth asking a straightforward question: is your payroll still keeping up with the shape of your company? For a lot of scaling firms, the honest answer is not quite, and the reasons are rarely dramatic.
Very few companies decide to run global payroll in a complicated way. It happens gradually. You hire your first person in Germany, so you sign up a local provider. Then a small team joins in Spain, a contractor starts in the US, and an acquisition brings its own arrangement in Poland. Each decision makes sense on its own. Added together, you have a different provider, format and deadline in every country, and no single view of what you actually pay across the business.
For a company operating in several markets, that patchwork becomes normal rather than exceptional. It works, until it doesn’t.
Global Payroll
Payroll is one of the biggest numbers in any business. By KPMG’s estimate it runs to 40–60% of operating expenses (KPMG & UKG, 2026). When that spend is managed across a patchwork of systems, some of the cost shows up on an invoice, but most of it doesn’t. The larger cost sits in risk, wasted time and lost visibility.
Every country sets its own rules on tax, social contributions, filing deadlines and worker classification, and those rules change often. A missed update in one market can mean penalties, back payments or a review. In one survey of more than 600 global payroll professionals, 70% named compliance their single biggest challenge (Payslip, 2021).
Each cycle, finance and HR pull data from separate systems, reconcile mismatched formats and chase corrections. That is effort that could go into planning instead.
Manual handoffs between disconnected systems are where mistakes creep in. EY’s research in the US found that one in five payrolls contained errors, at an average of $291 each to correct (EY, 2022). Late or incorrect pay is also one of the quickest ways to lose an employee’s trust.
When payroll data lives in a dozen places, simple questions get hard. What do we spend per country? Where is the headcount growing fastest? How exposed are we if a rule changes next quarter?
People notice when pay is late, wrong or slow to fix. In a tight market for talent, that leaves a mark.
The patchwork often holds together until something forces a proper look at it.
These are the moments when fragmented payroll stops being an inconvenience and starts being a liability.
Fragmented payroll is rarely a technology problem first. It is a growth problem.
Expansion moves faster than the systems meant to support it, so each new market gets solved in the moment by whoever is closest to it, with whatever option is quickest.
No one sets out to build a fragmented setup. It is what you are left with when no one owns the whole picture.
It’s a straightforward way to see how consolidated your payroll is today and what to fix first.
The companies getting this right tend to separate payroll into two layers: one platform that brings everything together, and trusted local expertise underneath it.
Lano provides the technical layer. It consolidates all your global payroll operations in one place, with a single unified flow across every country, plus consolidated reporting, optimisation and AI support. Instead of a dozen disconnected processes, you get one source of truth and a clear view of what you pay everywhere you operate, across 150+ countries.
Behind the platform sit local payroll providers who keep you compliant in each country. Lano vets these providers and has worked with them over many years, so the local knowledge that keeps payroll accurate and on the right side of every regulation is built in, country by country.
One of those key providers is Tugela People, which covers UK payroll. With 14 years’ experience, Tugela runs UK payroll to the standard the platform depends on, so your UK payroll is both fully compliant locally and connected to your single global view.
The setup is also flexible. If you already have local payroll partners you trust and would rather not switch, you can keep them. Lano connects your existing providers to the platform, so you carry on working with the partners you know while gaining one place to manage, report on and control every payroll you run internationally.
If you are not sure where your payroll stands, these five questions are a useful test:
If several of those are hard to answer, your payroll has probably not kept pace with your growth. The encouraging part is that this is fixable, and you do not have to rebuild everything at once.
Talk to us about system selection, implementation, or optimisation, wherever you are in the journey.
Your Questions Answered
Global payroll is the process of managing payroll for employees and workers across multiple countries. It involves coordinating salary payments, tax, social-security contributions, reporting and local compliance requirements across different jurisdictions.
Global payroll can be managed through a centralised platform that brings payroll data and processes from different countries together. Local payroll providers or specialists then manage country-specific requirements, while the central system provides consolidated reporting and greater visibility across the organisation.
A well-managed global payroll setup can give businesses greater visibility over payroll costs, reduce manual administration, improve compliance and make it easier to manage employees across multiple countries. It can also provide finance and HR teams with a single view of international payroll data.
Global payroll consolidation means bringing payroll information and processes from multiple countries together into a more centralised system. Rather than managing separate providers and processes independently, businesses can use a single platform to manage, report on and oversee their international payroll.
Yes. Global payroll can be particularly useful for growing SMEs that are expanding into new markets and finding that managing separate payroll providers, systems and spreadsheets is becoming difficult. A centralised approach can help businesses scale without adding unnecessary complexity to their payroll processes.
Start by reviewing how many providers, systems and manual processes you currently rely on. Look at whether you have a single view of payroll costs and headcount across countries, how compliance updates are managed and how much time your teams spend reconciling data. From there, you can identify where consolidation or automation could make the biggest difference.
Let’s talk
Our international team of expert consultants has over 50 years of collective experience and multi-system HR knowledge.
Get in touch to find out how we can help your organisation thrive.
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info@tugelapeople.com
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