Cloud Payroll – your options
A few weeks back Oracle announced they are building out a Cloud Payroll localisation for France. It struck me at the time as an interesting move. French payroll is notoriously difficult – known both for its complexity and the frequency of change – so undertaking to deliver it is a real statement of intent. It’s not an enhancement you’d commit to lightly, and is certainly not something you say just for quick PR inches.
With the addition of Oracle France Payroll, Oracle Cloud HCM will provide built-in payroll support for 13 countries including Bahrain, Canada, China, Kuwait, Mexico, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States, with upcoming support for India and Oman.
I saw this quote from Holger Muller (Principal Analyst, Constellation Research) on native integration over writing interfaces out to 3rd party providers:
“Payroll is one of the single most important functions for keeping a workforce running smoothly. Employees have zero tolerance for mistakes or delays when it comes to their compensation, no matter how complicated the local rules and regulations are. It’s essential that organizations use a cloud-based payroll system that natively integrates with their core HR systems to automatically stay up to date with changes in regulations and their workforce.”
eBusiness Suite delivered loads of country extensions – but interestingly never tackled France. PeopleSoft also had a good set of localisations but – with the exception of North American Payroll – they move to ‘market driven support’ from January 2023 (i.e. customers must purchase the support from Oracle ACS or other partners).
It had me wondering what the other vendors have in terms of native Cloud Payroll support, so I thought I’d do a little research.
Workday just has payrolls for 4 countries – US, Canada, the UK and France – and you’d need to interface out to a 3rd party supplier for anywhere else so lags considerably behind Oracle.
From what I can tell SuccessFactors seems to use an integrated, hosted version of SAP’s on-premises payroll software as SuccessFactors’ Employee Central Payroll application. Integrating back to a hosted version of a legacy payroll is clearly not the same as a Cloud-native payroll, but the flipside is that they don’t need to develop Cloud-native payroll country localisations and can keep using the old ones.
Caveat emptor, indeed.
Fusion Tipster 