An employer of record (EOR) can be an effective option for streamlining payroll and benefit management. Their local expertise and operating systems are set up to ease your administrative burden, mitigate risks and offer faster solutions for scale.
But how should your EOR services be helping you achieve efficiency?
We'd like to share our thoughts as an EOR in the Middle East.
Streamlining payroll and benefits management: How your EOR should help
In our view, there are six ways your EOR should help you streamline payroll and benefits management (particularly here in the Middle East). These include:
1. Simplifying compliance
Compliance is one of the biggest hurdles you will face. Ensuring you have a team to do that effectively means streamlining your payroll process. But what if you have an EOR who employs your staff?
In our view (as an EOR), you need a partner with a comprehensive system that centralises payroll data and offers real-time reporting. This makes compliance audits and reports easier to run and more accurate.
Their data also needs to be clean, which means their time and attendance tracking has to be accurate. How your EOR approaches this will be evident in their ability to pay on time without error.
2. Streamlining through automation and employee portals
Automation is one of the easiest ways to streamline payroll processing and benefit management. Your EOR should have a system that delivers automation for a more efficient and error-free process.
Employee self-service is also a must. It helps reduce tasks on support tickets, personal information updates and tracking time-off requests. It also keeps employees in the process, which is vital for employer/employee relations.
3. Managing multi-currency payroll
If you are working with an international EOR, you are likely planning to or already work across borders. Your EOR provider should be set up to manage various currencies and their fluctuations to ensure that employees are paid accurately.
Your EOR should also be able to integrate payroll systems across new borders, providing seamless and standardised tax processing and filing wherever you choose to expand next.
4. Streamlined benefits and deductions management
Just as your EOR should be adept at understanding currencies, they should also understand different rules regarding employee benefits, such as healthcare, retirement plans, bonuses, and paid leave. And how these differ across borders if you work internationally and employ an international EOR.
They should also be adaptable so that they can be compliant while representing your brand to employees. The best way to do this is to have a flexible system that tracks employee enrollment, changes, or claims and aligns it to compliance and brand guidelines.
5. Reducing the risk of payroll errors
Even minor mistakes in payroll can lead to issues such as overpayments, underpayments, tax discrepancies, or missed deadlines—all of which can harm a company's reputation and result in penalties. Your EOR should have an audited and updated system to ensure account managers can pay your staff correctly and submit filings on time. How they invest in their team and system should prove their commitment to reducing risk and increasing efficiency.
6. Providing scale while streamlining
It will be important to you that you have the option to scale your payroll and benefit management. How your EOR provides for this will be critical.
In most cases, where a good system is in place, an EOR should be able to offer flexibility not just in employee numbers but also in the diversity of their service provision—offering a streamlined solution that avoids the headache of operating in-house functions.
Streaming payroll and benefits management with mselect in the Middle East
We have offered payroll and benefits management for several years across our Middle Eastern hubs. One thing all of our clients have in common is the need for a flexible and streamlined solution. They don't want operational headaches, so they outsource. And reliability is key. This is why we have been so committed to investing in our systems and our teams.
Throughout this blog post, we hope to have shown you what you should expect when you work with an EOR partner. And if you are operating in the Middle East we'd like to offer you our help.
Contact your local hub today to get started.