Deel’s Daniel Mellor: The hidden cost of ‘good enough’ payroll for fast-growing businesses
Payroll rarely makes the pitch deck, but it can seriously slow down your business once the team grows beyond everyone sitting in the same room.
For founder-led companies, the day-to-day pain is all too familiar: multiple spreadsheets, reams of emails, disparate vendors, all to get people paid correctly and on time.
Daniel Mellor, director of operations at Deel, says the most visible problems are the time-consuming admin work. But there’s a simple way that founders and senior finance staff can cast off those shackles and get back to growing the business.
The payroll pain points that get worse as you scale
International expansion is a classic trigger.
“When you get into a new local market by winning a job or getting that Hail Mary contract, it’s a mad scramble to get the talent overseas, to get everything set up and make sure you’re doing things compliantly,” Mellor tells SmartCompany.
That scramble can slow momentum right when speed matters most.
Domestic complexity can bite too. In Australia, payroll gets harder once you’re dealing with different awards in different states, and you’re tracking more from a spreadsheet perspective. That’s when mistakes and errors crop up.
“From a compliance perspective, that leads to issues like people getting underpaid or overpaid, and all of a sudden you’re starting to lose the trust of your workforce, and the trust that you’re a professional business and you know what you’re doing,” Mellor says.
How to build a “unified payroll infrastructure”
Deel is coming to the rescue for founders who are dealing with these very real – and potentially business-ending – problems thanks to its unified payroll infrastructure.
So what exactly does that mean? As Mellor explains it: “Deel treats all of your employees as people. It doesn’t matter what way they are employed as, whether they’re contractors or EOR [Employer of Record] employees or global payroll staff. Everything is centralised in one place, and all of the different aspects of employment are linked to a central profile”.
From there, founders can plug in the workflows they need.
Mellor gives the example of expenses: “All of your claims and expenses go through an approval process. It’s as easy as turning on a module. You select which group of employees you want to apply it to and then all of a sudden it’s coming straight through onto your payroll report and it’s open for those employees to submit their expenses through Deel”.
For founders and finance teams, the big win here is consistency in reporting. Instead of collating “six different reports from six different providers in six different formats”, Mellor says it’s just one report in one system.
Compliance support, without losing visibility
Mellor describes Deel’s approach as a mix of both automation and people.
On the automation side, he says the compliance portal can flag changes and take prompt actions. If a minimum-wage change in one part of the world affects an employee, it’s a one-click process to amend the minimum wage.
On the human side, he points to terminations: “When you’re ending a contract for an employee, it’s always a very complex thing to do, especially internationally. Deel has all of the rules, the guidelines, [and] the best practices for validations through the termination process”.
And specialists can help because, as Mellor puts it, “at the end of the day, it’s a negotiation”.
Removing real-time payroll friction
Mellor says one consistent benefit that founders appreciate from Deel is getting faster and more accurate payroll. “Deel has local engines in over 40 countries now, which means completely real-time payroll. You put the inputs in and the payslips come out. It’s that quick and easy.”
That speed changes the payroll calendar. Compared to a process where it might take three weeks to process a single payroll, Mellor says with Deel, you can submit your payroll on the 25th for a payday at the end of the month.
Usability is another advantage. “Most payroll software and interfaces are very difficult to use and very siloed,” Mellor says. “They’re built for specific markets and are bespoke.” Deel’s system, on the other hand, is designed to stay simple at the top level and detailed when needed. “It’s so easy to navigate, but you can also go deep when you need to.”
Finally, there’s the benefit of getting your best people back on growth work. Mellor shares a local example: “We worked with a Melbourne-based client who had their best finance guy spending his entire time on payroll. Because they were a global company in eight countries, they didn’t trust anyone else to do it. But at the same time, they needed him to start working on expansion projects”.
Moving to Deel helped offload all of that admin and maintenance, which freed him up for the most valuable projects with serious growth prospects.
To wrap it up, ‘good enough’ payroll may cut it for one business stage. But as things get more complicated, at speed, the next stage requires smart thinking and systems to match.
