International Payroll Manager

Company Overview: Berkeley Research Group (BRG), headquartered in Emeryville, CA, provides independent expert testimony, advisory services, and data analytics to major law firms, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and regulatory bodies around the world. BRG experts provide sophisticated economic, financial, and analytical advice across a wide range of disciplines including antitrust and competition policy, complex damages, finance, healthcare, intellectual property, valuation, and workforce issues. In addition, the firm assists clients in major industry sectors with compliance, business process improvement, and strategy consulting.

Job Overview: We are looking for an International Payroll Manager to deliver all aspects of managing the EMEA and APAC payrolls, ensuring accuracy and completeness. The payroll team is based in the US, and you will be supported by two colleagues whom you will directly manage. You will have a high degree of autonomy and accountability. This is a hands-on, operational role including preparation, distribution, processing, and reporting of payroll to ensure compliance with all applicable regulations. We encourage creativity and any opportunities to bring in automation and improvements.

This is a new role following significant year-on-year growth in our international practices. You will partner closely with the payroll team and payroll vendors to manage the payroll for 11 countries (UK, Belgium, Italy, France, UAE [Dubai], South Africa, Hong Kong, Thailand, China, Australia, and Singapore). In the years ahead, it is highly likely that we will expand into new jurisdictions as well.

Duties:

The International Payroll Manager will take the lead on the below matters for EMEA and APAC:

1. Payroll processing for all countries. Deliver payroll within agreed SLAs, ensuring accuracy, completeness, and compliance with legislation, internal policy, processes, and controls.
2. Facilitate all required month-to-month payroll changes (new hires, leavers, statutory leaves, unpaid leave, compensation adjustments, bonuses, benefit elections, and deductions, etc.).
3. Implement processes to ensure payroll integrity through audit reports, data analysis, and collaboration with other team members.
4. Investigate, reconcile, and correct payroll data issues, discrepancies, and errors.
5. Act as a subject matter expert for all employee payroll queries.
6. Support the payroll, employee tax, and pension setup of any new jurisdictions, collaborating with external vendor(s) and the internal project teams.
7. Ensure that all Government reports and obligations are always met.
8. Timely and accurately prepare on-demand payments for terminations, retro-adjustments, and other disbursements determined to be necessary for immediate distribution.
9. Develop, manage, and maintain comprehensive payroll records and team member information in a confidential manner.
10. Coordinate payroll funding requests with Treasury.

Accounting and Other Responsibilities:

1. Support good practice automations and process improvements (with Workday and our payroll vendors including Dayforce).
2. Reconcile general ledger (GL) with regard to payroll transactions.
3. Prepare payroll journal entries including PTO accrual.
4. Proper mapping of income and deduction codes.
5. Liaise between payroll and other departments.
6. Assist with documentation of various payroll processes and procedures.
7. Provide payroll support for internal and external audit requests.

Required Qualifications:

1. Appropriate payroll-related qualifications/certificates.
2. Significant experience in managing UK and EMEA payroll and minimum of some experience managing APAC payroll.
3. Experience working in Professional Services or a similar environment would be a benefit in this role.
4. Workday or similar enterprise software experience is a must.
5. Excellent communication, exceptional customer service, and project management skills.
6. Ability to influence and build payroll processes.
7. Exceptional organisational skills, follow-up skills, and attention to detail.
8. Deadline-focused and exhibits analytical and problem-solving ability.
9. Ability to work well in a fast-paced environment.
10. High degree of professionalism with the ability to deal sensitively with confidential material.