Expanding your business into new countries is exciting, but also challenging. With unique requirements in each country including company formation, taxes, national insurance, pension schemes, and statutory benefits, it is vital to ensure your organization is compliant with local in-country regulations before you start hiring employees. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, so having the right tools and resources in place now can save you fines and penalties for non-compliance later. Here are the top 3 considerations for global expansion:
Company Formation
Companies have many entity options to choose from when expanding into a new market. Selecting the right business entity for your company will depend on your industry type and the country. For example, if you are expanding into Canada, you have the option to incorporate your business federally, but if you are doing business in Quebec, you must also register with the Quebec Enterprise Register. Each country has unique registration laws, and your tax liabilities often are determined based on the type of entity you set up. Some companies choose to use an Employer of Record (EOR) instead of registering a business entity in each country. Read our blog related to entity vs. EOR here
Multi-Country Payroll
Payroll is another major consideration when expanding overseas. Are you sending a team from the US or are you planning to hire in-country talent? Every employee must have the right pay, statutory benefits, pension scheme, and withhold tax according to the regulations in each country and based on their employment and citizenship status. If you have employees across multiple countries, using different vendors in each country can be expensive and lack the visibility and reporting that you need as an organization. Using one platform to manage global payroll helps standardize the payroll process and maintain control, provides real-time payroll access and reporting across countries, and automates updates to in-country changes to regulations.
Integration
Identifying what systems are being used across the organization to manage your global workforce can help determine if there are opportunities for integration. If you can reduce the number of systems across countries and integrate your US payroll, global payroll, and global HRIS, expanding into new markets will be a more seamless process and you can standardize your payroll across multiple countries.
Blue Marble provides global expansion services with our dedicated global consulting team. We can help with business entity registration, statutory benefits, and labor requirements so you can ensure compliance in each country. With our cloud-based global payroll platform, you have real-time access to payroll across countries and currencies, aggregated reporting, and in-country experts to help when questions come up. Talk to us about your business expansion challenges so we can help you get started.