18 months running payroll across 7 countries and what a journey it has been

Since payday is coming up soon, I wanted to put together an honest write-up since I keep getting DMs about my EOR setup and I'm tired of pointing people to vendor blog posts that read like they were written by chatgpt. I am part of a 45-person SaaS company, and we have been using our current paying provider since I think like late 2024, the majority of our team are in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Germany, France, Mexico, and the Philippines.

What is workig from what I have seen is that onboarding speed is legitimately fast, every hire after the first has been 10 working days or less from offer accepted to first compliant payslip. Country compliance has been the real win though. When the Singapore EP salary threshold jumped to S$5,600 we got a heads-up email three weeks before it hit, walked us through what it meant for our two Singapore hires, one was below the new threshold and they laid out the renewal options without us having to chase anyone.

Severance accruals show up as a line item every month so when we had to let someone go in Mexico the cost was already provisioned, and I mean no surprise number dropped on my desk at the worst possible time, and the dashboard isn't pretty but pay runs are visible, contracts are accessible, and employee changes are logged.

Honestly, that's all I need it to do! I have been having redditors and sales reps trying to sell me heaven and earth with their ai built systems, and sometimes (idk it could just be me) they make it too complicated.