As 2022 draws to a close  Raj & I want to take the opportunity to look back on a year that turned out much differently than anyone could have imagined. While it was certainly challenging in many ways, it also showed how strong we are as a company. We would also like to take a moment to thank our team for their tireless work and without whom we would not be in the position we are today. We have enjoyed many successes together.

With 2022 coming to an end and with the world now fully open for business, companies are moving into 2023 with a renewed vigor of growing their business exponentially and while payroll remains one of the most important factors of a business to keep employees loyal and engaged, it is something that should not be at the forefront of worry while growing your business.

Everyone knows that Payroll is the fundamental part of a business. An error could result in lack of trust with management and employees walking out. When it comes to payroll, there is little to no room for error.

While compensation and recruitment and even organisational culture may be top-class, there is one deciding factor that will either make or break the deal – how you handle expat talent management.

HR teams pride themselves in people management. That’s the cornerstone of their existence within an enterprise. With the expert guidance of a PEO partner, you could grow your business and have peace of mind that your business is safe while doing so.

This is a question many businesses have been grappling with of late. More often than not, this question will go unanswered till it is too late and their payroll has reached a crisis stage. By the time they have made the decision to audit their payroll processes HR is probably already pulling their hair out by this point and quite likely thinking about throwing in the towel.

Given the complex nature of payroll and the scrutiny it deserves partnering with a payroll outsourcing service provider will allow you to free up time to allow your team to focus their efforts on your core business, minimise compliance and legislative risks and to secure payroll processing in a secure environment.

One of the lesser considered outsourcing practices is payroll outsourcing. As it falls under the Human Resources and Finance departments of companies, this critical financial process is limited to in-house surveillance. All companies go to great lengths to keep financial transactions under their wing. But at what cost? Although there’s a lot of denial when it comes to expenditure, these hidden costs do see daylight when you open your ledger to add it all up.

Expat relocation & work permit requisites can be complex for global ventures that are new to Malaysia. Find out how best to resolve immigration issues by having a reliable employee mobility solutions partner who knows the ins and outs of expat relocation

If you are an expatriate employee or an HR manager looking for a provider to manage payroll and payslips for your contract workforce, there are some basic statutory deductions in Malaysia you ought to know about

Though doing business in Malaysia is a step easier than most Asian nations, understanding the country’s statutory obligations may be burdensome for the new entrant. Hiring a Professional Employer Organisation (PEO) to recruit your contract staff or manage their payroll is one way that allows global companies to test waters in such new markets.

Cost has been one of the biggest concerns in recent times. As the pandemic prolongs, organisations are deliberately running most of their operational costs on shoestring budgets. To beat high pricing offered by global payroll providers, CHROs of MNCs in Malaysia need to look for cost-effective payroll delivery that is secure, simple and light on the pocket.

As the year slows down and we look optimistically into 2022, it is also a time for reflection and gratitude. 2021 was a year where the ‘new normal’ seemed almost ‘natural’

Onsite or remote, you need to ensure payroll is compliant for all your employees. While social distancing has opened up a whole new world of remote working, it has also propelled businesses to dip into global talent pools for sourcing different skill sets. Whether they have a distributed workforce or are going through a temporary phase of WFH, companies are still obligated to pay all their employees regardless of location. Propay Partners specialises in handling expat tax and immigration compliance requirements for distributed workforce of global MNCs. We adhere to all payroll requirements of all their employees, right from salary, incentives, benefits, insurance and bonus pay.

One of the most important concerns while setting up operations in a foreign country is employee hiring. While some countries need labour for a specific duration of the year, others are unsure how to go about it as they would be entering a new market for the first time. To expedite the process, many companies are known to cut corners during the recruitment phase, only to shoot themselves in the foot when compliance checks spring up later. If hassle free employee hiring is what you are looking for, read on to explore your options.

All companies seek a financial reputation that is in accordance with the law and want to remain compliant. Tax season is a busy time and not always the best time to get tangled up in tax errors. There are also chances that you may not know an error has occurred. But does really that happen?

Lock down or not, hiring will always be an ongoing process. If companies need to make anything their focal point, it's on-boarding. Remote working can be a great hindrance to building positive employee engagement, especially for a new hire. Making them feel like they are a valued team member even when working at a distance requires a carefully planned on-boarding programme.

Many companies know that managing local payroll with is a complicated and daunting task. And when a company expands globally, managing payroll successfully can be even more of a challenge. Local laws and regulations can present significant barriers to the in-house management of payroll operations.

Here’s a blanket rule all employers know too well – You Can’t Skip Payroll. No matter what the lockdown is doing to your business, you can’t compromise on payroll. That applies to employers as well as payroll outsourcing companies like us. At Propay Partners, payroll was remotely carried out by syncing all departments to function together in the same rhythm.

Propay Partners is an HR outsourcing company specialising in payroll and employee mobility solutions through SaaS pay-per-use models. Past experiences have always pointed to HR as one of the first departments to bear the brunt of the cost-cutting blow. Lower budgetary allocation has always come at the expense of poor HR services, often leading to dissatisfaction and mismanagement in the long run. Sometimes, to achieve greater pace, we may need to invest in better shoes.

Propay Partner’s Compliance Helpdesk is a 24X7 hotline that weeds out all regulatory and compliance hassles. Our helpdesk guides clients on internal policies and procedures, as well as federal and state laws. Our compliance executives also prioritize educating clients to help them institute practices within their firms that will ensure the highest possible level of compliance.

At Propay Partners, we use SaaS enabled payroll software to cater to a plethora of HCM solutions like time attendance, e-HR on Cloud, employee profile viewing, leaves, tax filing, work hours and even profile sharing during inter-company transfer.

Propay Partners’ PEO services accelerates corporate entry for global entrants by taking over their legal paperwork, immigration requirements, invoicing and contracting operations by minimising complexities and lag. As experts in FDI ventures in the country, we serve clients according to global standards and procedures.

With most or all employees working from home, companies need to think of better ways to deliver payroll on time. To get every worth of your investment back, organisations need to look into payroll outsourcing while focusing on future operations roadmap.

The best strategy is to predict change and keep guessing how your business will change in the future. Leaders should understand that the strategy they have right now may not be the right one at all when a crisis strikes.

On any other given day, a payroll outsourcing proposal would have meant countless physical meetings, client demos, contract-signing and a good deal of handshakes. Perhaps not anymore. At least, not anytime in the near future. The world of work is transitioning to the virtual and so is, payroll.

Propay Partners is a payroll outsourcing and employee mobility solutions company truly committed to achieving compliance and bolstering employee mobility solutions. Our two-decade long experience in payroll and compliance has given us vast experience with multinationals of all kinds. As specialists in tax, anti-fraud and wage regulations, we host secure employee and payroll data on ISO-backed systems.

At Propay Partners, we provide payroll outsourcing and employee mobility solutions for global startups and multinationals operating in Malaysia, Singapore & Thailand. Our cloud-based payroll and human capital management services offer inter-company transfer, payroll switch from different providers and comprehensive payroll migration in just 12 weeks. We help businesses replace outdated payroll systems with user profiles on cloud accessible both on mobile and desktop.

At Propay Partners, we help global brands with hiring contingent workforce based on their projects and capabilities. From contracting, invoicing and issuing payroll, we provide a whole set of employee mobility services on cloud and mobile apps to enable talents to create groundbreaking results.

Payroll operations represent a silent cogwheel that never stops in the midst of any crisis. Often underrated, payroll is a significant indicator of employee morale.

Although it looks easier from the outside, company formation rules in Malaysia are guarded by stringent business partnerships norms that substantially promote local proprietorship and domestic entrepreneurship. Propay Partners is a payroll outsourcing advisory and PEO firm that has been handling payroll systems for global ventures for the last two decades.

Most companies hardly think of payroll as a contingency measure during a crisis because they are busy worrying about sustaining sales, marketing and delivery systems to cut down losses and debt. Having a payroll outsourcing solutions partner simplifies day-to-day costs handling of the workforce and compliance concerns to a large extent.

Rapid spread of the Covid-19 virus has thrown the whole world in to a state of inactivity, with several businesses ceasing operations and workforce engagement. Consequently, a large percentage of people have been thrown off their jobs, creating a fearful shadow of a recession that is to come in the next few months.

Payroll outsourcing is an efficient and dependable way to ensure that professionals handle your pay and employee welfare according to government-prescribed formats.

Payroll outsourcing is not just about adoption and management. It’s more like being called in to fix problems where you can’t find any obvious ones.

The extent to which smartphones are dictating our lives is becoming indescribable. Their popularity, driven by technological finesse and supercomputer-like processes, doesn’t just make them a piece of technology carried in our pockets but an essential tool for survival.

It’s been a fantastic year – of hard work, challenging projects, memorable milestones and great celebration. As the New Year dawns on our lives, it’s the perfect time to reflect on our wonderful partnership in the past year - one that has steered us closer to our dreams, aspirations and goals in life.

Bleak global economic outlooks have always questioned whether economies are really robust and talent markets really flourishing. While fluctuation is an ongoing process that produces ripples across nations, it can’t be held true for all trading blocs. Even as US and Europe battle erratic investor interests due to ongoing trade wars and slow manufacturing, ASEAN is facilitating business expansion much better than its rival production hubs in China and South Asia.

There comes times in every leader’s period in office where he or she has to up the game to maximize team performance. Everything that needs to be achieved has to be done according to the dictates of modern-day people management theories, most of which have been made trendy by major blue-chip companies and overnight urban startups successes.

There are also times when companies start new ventures in different continents and move their talents for expertise and management. During such circumstances, companies formulate mobility clauses to reasonably ensure that the rights of both the employer and the employee are protected in their new setting.

The Deloitte Global Millennial Survey released earlier this year analyses millennial behaviour in ways better than those previously explored. As a ‘generation disrupted’, the survey points out how they are breaking away from traditional ‘success markers’ like raising a family or buying a house to traveling the world and serving their communities. And like everything else, their attitude to jobs and organisations is also no different.

In the wake of globalization, an increasing number of MNCs have found their way to the resource-rich landscapes of South East Asia where labour is cheap and consumption, plentiful. Companies have also benefitted from its internet-dependent populations who are startup savvy and have an open mind to innovation and technological disruption. Its increasing population has also witnessed a higher number of millennials at the workplace who are redefining concepts of hierarchy, inclusion and diversity at the workplace.

Organizations that have the greatest reach in terms of business and clientele should mandatorily institute enterprise-wide risk management policies that shield it from online theft and data breach. Protecting the business from cyber frauds not only totals up one’s reputation as a credible business partner, but also ensures the security of company and financial data from malicious hackers.

Cognitive technology is a derivative of artificial intelligence where computers employ predictive analysis to study and imitate human thinking patterns. Through extensive data mining and data matching, these computers can interact with users through natural language and help us in our day-to-day affairs. In HR particularly, cognitive technology helps enhance end user experience while robotics process automation, called RPA, can do away with high-volume processes in a matter of minutes.

Every year, the ASEAN welcomes scores of global companies eager to set up businesses in the region. Multinationals flock in from America, Europe & the Mediterranean to take advantage of the region’s rich labour, raw material and consumer markets. In most cases, global ventures set foot without any know-how of local labour laws, salary norms or statutory compliance, resulting in frequent run-ins with various regulatory departments.

Ours is an age of collaborative work processes where businesses thrive on functional synergies, dynamic organizational models and mobile workplaces. Agility, in all senses, rules the roost when it comes to determining success in the corporate space. Agile workplaces, in turn, give rise to new kinds of engagement, which takes businesses to several offshore markets.

The need to develop regular conversations on performance has becoming more demanding – from a year-end process to a quarterly or mid-year process. Removing assessments from the rigid frameworks they currently exist in can make room for more mentoring, coaching and other kinds of formal learning.

As a business leader, managing team dynamics against a multitude of personalities, work competencies, cultural backgrounds and work experiences can be a challenging job. Building positive dynamics starts with a constructive strategy that combines observation, action, conflict resolution, clarity and goal-setting.

A Professional Employer Organization or PEO is a company that acts as the local employer on record for international client companies planning to make investments in new markets.

Having been in the outsourcing industry long enough, I can tell why companies shy away at the very mention of the word. Everybody is entitled to their beliefs, and in this case, it is common to assume that payroll outsourcing is expensive, risky and, like most CEOs think, beyond one’s control. For many companies, outsourcing is an additional burden rather than a solution.

Ensuring pay parity among employees is a contributing factor to ending gender- based and racial discrimination. Companies should lay out better internal promotion policies to block any undercurrent of unconscious or unexplained bias.

Unlike previous generations where employment with an organization lasted almost a lifetime, the modern talent is looking at contributing to only specific assignments posted by organizations. This new wave of employment (the gig economy) focuses more on short-term engagement with desired employers who are, in turn, hunting for specific skills.

Payroll outsourcing providers, on the other hand, are usually shy to approach large MNCs. One assumption is that they (being global corporations) need no local support at all; let alone sealing a deal with them. However, reality is far from what meets the eye.

Outsourcing compliance is one of the best ways to avoid penalties in the long run. Hiring a payroll outsourcing company to take care of your employees’ payroll and legal needs can reduce a lot of irrelevant paperwork and save up time.

Payroll outsourcing companies have their own unique ways in which they operate with companies. Those that have been around for decades have vast experience dealing with changing aspects of HR.

Today, robots or bots as they are usually called can understand and analyze any instruction given to them and respond accordingly. Whether it’s reading heaps of data in seconds or operating round the clock without a salary, bots have become the most default and cost-effective choice for organizations focusing on smarter solutions at workplaces.

The usually mundane payroll process can be sped up through automated features. Compared to the manual payroll processing, an effective payroll solution can minimize the margins of human error. An automated system can always pay your employees on time and to the parameters you set.

Having an HR and payroll outsourcing partner can give you peace of mind, knowing that they are keeping up with the latest regulations, providing information to you in a timely manner and helping you reduce both costs and liability. Payroll outsourcing is the most pragmatic and innovative solution that companies can rely on to stay ahead of technology as well as excel in business.

Hiring the right talents matter and retaining them matters even more. Businesses are building workspaces exclusively for their employees - catering to every single need so that they can concentrate on maximising performance.

Outsourcing payroll is one of the best options for companies who are looking to focus on their core business. But if done without proper research and commitment, it can become disastrous, affecting business continuity and causing colossal financial loss.

When you first start your business, you are most likely going to do a lot of research and investment. Outsourcing payroll saves you time and the occasional compliance headache.

17 years ago two ambitious men decided to start a payroll outsourcing company. To continue growing as entrepreneurs, they had to proactively lead the business needed for each particular stage of growth. And since a company’s needs changed at each stage, they had to keep evolving at the right pace.

Shaping Future HR Leaders

When is the best time of the year to reach for that phone to make that one call that could save you a lot of hassle?

As HR practitioners, we are aware that changes will take place with the arrival of digital technology.

Growing a successful business out of a personal passion is a great achievement, but there may come a time when the tasks of running that growing business may start sapping away your ability to do what you truly love.

Today many companies seek to outsourcing payroll and their processes especially instead of employing manpower and technology to manage them internally. Through this, businesses can ensure a high degree of savings and stay competitive in the market than losing out by taking the entire burden on themselves.