Globe moves into new field

MANILA, Philippines—Ayala-led Globe Telecom is venturing into the corporate software business with the launch of a new “cloud”-based payroll system for small businesses, in line with the diversification of the company’s products to help offset the decline in traditional telco revenues.

At a briefing this week, Globe unveiled its new PayRoll Cloud solution, the first of many business software services the company plans to offer over the next few months.

PayRoll Cloud, a web browser-based payroll engine hosted over the Internet, helps small businesses that can’t afford enterprise-grade solutions to efficiently manage employee salaries.

“We understand the basic issues that small businesses face. This is something all businesses do every 15 days. In some cases, every week, in some cases, every day,” Globe Business head Jesus Romero said.

“This is our first software-as-a-service (SaaS) product from a business process perspective. We run this full application on our cloud so we are able to give customers access to advanced applications,” he said.

Globe’s PayRoll Cloud goes for as low as P3,400 a month for small businesses. This subscription includes a 2 megabit-per-second (mbps) Internet connection. Romero said the new payroll service integrates seamlessly with existing timekeeping and attendance systems that small businesses have in place.

The new service automates the preparation of a company’s payroll system, making it more efficient for owners. Common errors that stem from the manual computation of employees’ daily attendance or leaves of absences are also eliminated.

“Business owners and their accountants know that the payroll process has many ‘pain points,’” Romero said. “Encoding and reviewing information is tedious and still prone to error. There are external summary reports to be made, like the ones for bank debit memo and remittances for government agencies.”

Romero said the company would launch more business process services in the coming months, depending on the needs of the company’s customers.