One company, a dozen payroll systems

Every new country you hire in adds another payroll provider, another login, another spreadsheet. Most finance teams don't notice how scattered it has become, until it starts costing them.

With National Payroll Week happening in the UK (7-11 September 2026), we teamed up with Impact HR and Tugela People to look at why growing international companies are taking a closer look at payroll consolidation. Wherever you are headquartered, it's a fair week to ask a blunt question: do you know, right now, what you spend on payroll in every country you operate in?

For a lot of scaling companies, the honest answer is no. Payroll has spread across a dozen systems that don't talk to each other, and no one owns the whole picture.

Almost no one chooses a fragmented payroll setup. It builds up one decision at a time. Your first hire in France needs a local provider, so you find one. A team forms in India and brings another. Contractors start in Brazil, and an acquisition arrives with its own arrangement in Germany. Each choice is reasonable on the day you make it. A year or two later you are running payroll through a different provider, in a different format, on a different deadline in every country, with no single place that shows what you pay in total.

For a business spread across a handful of markets, that is simply how payroll tends to end up. It holds together until it doesn't.

Payroll is rarely a small line item. KPMG puts it at 40–60% of operating expenses for most organisations (KPMG & UKG, 2026), and when something that large runs across disconnected systems, the waste hides in the gaps between them. It tends to show up in three places:

• Costly errors - EY found that one in five payrolls carries errors, at roughly $291 each to put right (EY, 2022). Most trace back to manual handoffs between tools that were never built to talk to each other.

• Compliance exposure - Every country sets its own rules on tax, contributions, filing dates and worker classification, and those rules keep moving. Handled market by market, a single missed change can mean penalties, back payments or an audit, often discovered only after the fact.

• Lost visibility - When payroll data lives in a dozen systems, the numbers your leadership needs are slow to assemble and quick to fall out of date. And every late or incorrect payslip chips away at the trust of the people you work hardest to keep.

Fragmented payroll can run for years without anyone calling it a problem. Then a moment forces the issue. Due diligence in a funding round needs clean, consolidated numbers across every entity, fast. An acquisition doubles your provider count overnight. A tax authority opens a query. A new finance leader asks a simple question and finds there is no simple answer. That is usually when consolidation stops being a good idea and becomes a priority for the quarter.

Consolidation does not mean ripping everything out and starting again. The companies that get it right tend to build in two layers.

The top layer is a single platform that connects every country in one place. This is what Lano's global payroll consolidation delivers: your payroll operations brought into one unified flow, with consolidated reporting, built-in optimisation and AI support, and a clear view of what you pay across 150+ countries. Instead of a dozen disconnected processes, you get one source of truth.

Underneath sit local payroll providers who handle the country-level detail that keeps you compliant. Lano vets these providers and works closely with experts like Impact HR and Tugela People to ensure local accuracy and compliance are built directly into the platform, market by market.

One of the points our clients tell us they value most is the flexibility. If you already have local partners you trust, you do not have to drop them. Lano can connect your existing providers to the platform, so you keep the relationships you rely on and still gain one place to manage, report on and control every payroll you run. You consolidate the view, without disrupting what already works.

"We see more and more of our clients operating internationally. They are headquartered in the UK but expanding quickly into new countries, and that is usually where the struggle begins: payroll is not consolidated across all those markets. That is exactly where our work with Lano comes in. We make sure UK payroll meets every local regulation and compliance requirement, while Lano brings the global coverage, visibility, reporting and consolidation together in one place.”

- Greg Guilford, CEO of Tugela People

Run your own setup through these questions. If you're hesitating on more than one, payroll has likely outgrown its current setup:

• Can you see the total payroll spend by country in one place, without asking around?

• If a tax or social-security rule changed tomorrow in one market, how quickly would you know?

• How many providers, logins and spreadsheets does your payroll run on today, and could anyone name them all?

• How much of each pay cycle goes on reconciling data by hand?

• If leadership asked for a global headcount and payroll-cost breakdown this afternoon, could you produce it with confidence?

The reassuring part is that fixing this is incremental. You can start by getting one clear view, then tighten from there.

National Payroll Week is a good push to take stock, and waiting has a cost. Every cycle you run on a fragmented setup is another month of manual work, avoidable risk and numbers you can't fully see. The first step is small: get a clear picture of how joined-up your payroll really is today.

Book a global payroll review with Lano.  We'll map your current setup and show where consolidation would pay off first.