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Table of Contents
What does payroll data include?
Why is payroll data important?
What are the benefits of payroll data insights?
What is payroll data?
Payroll data includes all the information necessary to calculate and process compensation for employees accurately.
What does payroll data include?
When onboarding a new hire, there are key pieces of information needed from employees to ensure accurate and timely payroll. Payroll data includes information, such as:
- Employee demographics
- Labor hours, overtime, and paid time off
- Salary and compensation
- Tax withholdings
- Employee benefits
- Retirement contributions
- Job codes
Why is payroll data important?
Though these details may seem mundane, they’re a crucial part of paying your employees compliantly. Inaccuracies in payroll data can lead to consequences like employee misclassification penalties and hefty fines.
Payroll data can also be a powerful tool when it’s standardized and leveraged strategically. It can show you current trends in your business and help drive future decisions. With the right payroll data tools, you can monitor trends like:
- Regional workforce costs
- Employee retention rates
- Workplace diversity
- Hours worked by department
- Overtime hours
- Average pay rates by role
What are the benefits of payroll data insights?
When payroll data is organized and monitored well, it can improve compliance, drive stronger global business decisions, and lead to better recruitment and retention.
Improved compliance
Maintaining compliance is a top concern for many global executives. However, it’s commonly clouded in confusion due to constantly evolving regulations for each country, state, and region.
Oftentimes, compliance issues stem from managing too many payroll providers and separate processes. Through research conducted by Forrester in 2024, we discovered that organizations are using an average of six different tools to manage payroll, and 50% of teams are using a combination of internal and external management.
In the 2025 Forrester Total Economic ImpactTM study, we found consolidating disparate payroll processes contributed to payroll specialists saving 50% of their time previously spent on research, onboarding and offboarding employees, and reporting. Additionally, global payroll managers saved 40% of their time on tasks like training specialists and escalating queries.
With a single, reliable payroll platform, maintaining compliance not only becomes more efficient, but it also becomes more accurate. Consolidating and automating payroll data prevents common problems like off-cycle payments, corrections, and calculation errors when working with different currencies and regulations.
Continuous Compliance™
Stronger global business decisions
Payroll data insights allow global leaders to quickly make informed and strategic business decisions. Instead of digging through endless spreadsheets, leaders can instantly spot trends and act on opportunities. Use payroll data to inform workforce planning, reduce costs, and uncover growth opportunities.
The right data also flags issues in real time, so you can address them proactively. For instance, if overtime hours suddenly surge at a particular facility, payroll data will alert you immediately. Your team can get to the root cause the same day, instead of losing weeks of productivity. That’s the power of having up-to-date payroll insights at your fingertips.
Better recruitment and retention
Talent decisions shouldn’t be guesswork. Payroll data gives you a clear, data-driven view of how you’re attracting and retaining top talent around the world. With a single source of truth, you can see exactly how salary, benefits, length of employment, and other employment trends vary across your global workforce.
Armed with this insight, you can connect talent trends to local cultures, making it easier to tailor compensation, benefits, and other offerings for each market. Want to know how a small salary boost could improve retention in Brazil versus Germany? Payroll data provides the necessary insights, and predictive models turn those answers into action.
By tapping into payroll data, you’re always a step ahead. You can engage your team, adjust strategies on the fly, and solve retention challenges before they grow—all with the confidence that comes from seeing the full picture.
