You have signed two people in a country your company has never paid anyone in. The offers are out, the start date is four weeks away, and somebody has asked when the first payslip lands. The maths will not be the problem. The problem is everything that has to exist before the maths is allowed to happen.

Check that you can legally be the employer

Payroll follows employment, and employment follows a legal presence. Settle who the employer is before anything else. Either your company has a registered entity in that country, or you are hiring through an employer of record whose entity carries the employment. There is no third option that survives an audit.

If you are setting up an entity, the incorporation date is not the date you can pay someone. Registering as an employer with the tax authority and with the social security body is usually a separate step, sometimes two that run in order. Get those lead times from your local accountant in writing, with dates on them, before you confirm a start date to anyone.

Read the contract as a payroll instruction

The signed contract determines the payroll run more than your payroll system does. Pull out every term in it with a number or a date attached: gross salary and the currency it is stated in, pay frequency, the pay date, probation length, notice period, overtime treatment, and any allowance quoted separately from base pay.

Then ask which of those are required locally rather than chosen by you. Some countries mandate a thirteenth month payment. Some require salary in local currency whatever the contract says. Some set a maximum interval between pay dates. Where your standard contract conflicts with local law, local law wins, and the payroll has to reflect that from the first run.

Separate what comes off gross from what sits on top of it

Write the deduction picture down before you configure anything. It usually breaks into four parts.

  • Income tax withheld from the employee, and whether withholding is your responsibility
  • Employee side social contributions, pension or provident fund, taken out of gross
  • Employer side contributions paid on top of gross, which never appear in anyone's net pay but do appear in your cost per head
  • Anything mandated without being statutory, such as an industry fund or a collective agreement levy

The third line catches finance teams out. The budget was built from gross salaries, and the real cost is gross plus employer contributions. Take the rates from the authority's own published schedule rather than a summary someone wrote two years ago, and note the date you took them.

Confirm what the payslip has to say

Payslip content is regulated in most places. There is normally a list of items that must appear: gross, each deduction named separately, net, the period covered, the employer's identification, sometimes leave balance and year to date figures. There may also be a required language and a retention period for the record. Check whether an electronic payslip counts as delivery.

Work out how the money actually arrives

Paying people is a different problem from calculating what they are owed. Confirm the payment file format your bank accepts, the cut off time for funds to land on the pay date, and what happens when the pay date falls on a public holiday you do not have in your calendar. If salaries are paid in local currency and funded from somewhere else, decide who carries the exchange rate movement and on which date the rate is fixed. Write that down in month one, because it gets questioned in month three.

Build the filing calendar before the first run, not after it

Filing a return and paying the money are usually two separate deadlines, and missing either is where penalties begin. Lay out the whole year: withholding returns, social contribution returns, year end reporting, any registration that has to be renewed. Put the local public holidays in the same calendar, since they move your cut off dates.

Run the first month twice

Calculate the first payroll in your own system, have your local accountant or provider calculate it independently, then compare line by line: gross, every deduction, net, and employer cost per person. Differences found now cost an afternoon. Differences found by an employee reading their first payslip cost far more, and an underpayment in someone's first month is remembered for years.

What to set up in the system beforehand

Whatever you run payroll on, the country specific parts have to be configurable rather than assumed. In Work Mint, currencies, tax slabs and statutory contributions such as provident fund and EOBI are set per organisation, so a second country is configuration rather than a rebuild. Enter the rates you sourced, then have whoever gave them to you check what you entered.

Keep the policy documents where your team can search them. Ask HR answers questions from the policy documents an organisation uploads, so someone asking about notice or leave entitlement gets what the document says rather than what a colleague remembers from another country.

None of this is hard. It is long, and nearly all of it has to be done before the first payslip rather than after. Start the registration steps the week you decide to hire, not the week the person starts.