You decided to consolidate. Now nobody can tell you who is employed by which entity.

In most European countries this is a new employment relationship rather than a transfer of an existing one, so each person needs a fresh contract under your entity on terms that at minimum match what they have now. Accrued entitlements and recognized seniority normally have to carry across, and in several markets the change triggers a notification or a consultation step before it can take effect. The workable sequence is entity and registrations first, contracts and notifications second, then a parallel pay run before the employer of record relationship ends. Doing those in the wrong order is what creates gaps in cover and in filings.

Yes, and it usually beats sequencing them a year apart, but only if one plan governs both. The new system needs employee data that reconciles, and that data only becomes reliable once payroll has been checked against the providers and the ledger. So we run the reconciliation ahead of each data load rather than treating it as clean-up after go-live. Where the go-live date genuinely can’t move, we prioritize the countries feeding the first release and leave the rest on the current setup until a later wave.

By treating the filing calendar as the fixed constraint and planning cutovers around it, rather than the other way around. Before anything moves, every registration, filing and deadline is listed per entity with a named owner. Conversions are then scheduled into the gaps between filing dates, and the outgoing provider stays responsible for the periods it processed until the final submission for those periods has been made and confirmed. Nothing is treated as handed over on the strength of an email.

Before the migration, not after. Reconciliation is the first deliverable rather than a phase at the end, because moving disputed figures just moves the dispute into a newer system. We rebuild year-to-date pay, employer costs and accruals per country from provider source data, compare them against the ledger and the HRIS, and record a cause for each difference. Some of those differences turn out to be genuine underpayments or missed contributions, which is uncomfortable, and still better found by you than by an inspector.

Fewer people than a platform migration, but the right ones. A People Operations owner who can decide on employment terms, someone in finance who owns the ledger and can approve reconciliation outcomes, and access to whoever administers the HRIS. Local managers are only needed when their own country converts. Most of the load sits in the register and reconciliation stage. Once a country has a signed sequence, the effort on your side is approval rather than production.

They keep running exactly as they do today. Consolidation is done per country and each one is complete in itself, so there’s no state where half your footprint is stuck between systems. It also means you can stop after two countries if priorities change, and what’s been converted stays converted. We’d rather sequence around your funding, your audit calendar and your busiest hiring quarter than move everything at once because it looks tidier on a plan.