Project reference · Agribusiness
Thirteen years as an export group’s payroll department.
An agricultural processing and export group in Ukraine runs its business through a dozen legal entities: a head office, production sites, and logistics and trading companies. Thirteen years ago it handed us the payroll of its first seven. We still run it today, through the start-up of a large new production site, a currency collapse and a full-scale war.
13+ years, one client
Continuity
One payroll run, every month
Payroll
12 companies and branches
Structure
Paid on time through the war
Wartime
The shape of the engagement
From seven companies to twelve
Each time the group added a company or a site, it came onto the same payroll, under the same contract template, in the month it started hiring.
The brief
What the client actually needed
Management and owners sat in the capital and abroad. Most of the people worked at production and logistics sites hundreds of kilometres away. Every company was a separate employer, with its own bank salary project, tax registration and reports. The group wanted one supplier that would calculate everything correctly and on time, and whose team would still be there next year.
That meant pay for office staff, plant operators, drivers and seasonal workers: advances and final pay, holidays and sick leave through the social fund, dismissals and civil contracts, alimony and bailiff deductions, tax and statistics reports, bank files for each salary project and postings for the client’s own accounting system. Later it also meant finding senior people for the group.
The hard parts
Where it gets difficult
One group, twelve employers
Each company needs its own register, bank file, act and invoice every month, and HR confirms the headcount per company before anything is billed. One mistake in the wrong entity’s file is a tax problem, not a typo.
A new site that changed the scale
When the group’s large production site started up, the payroll grew sharply within about eighteen months: shift workers, new cost centres, new premiums and a second location to take data from.
Data that arrives on payday
Inputs from a distant site came in on the payment date, in several versions, with same-day dismissals at close of business. We wrote a responsibility chart of 47 steps, each with an owner and a deadline, into the contract.
Wartime
Since 2022 payroll has handled mobilisation and demobilisation, protected pay for staff who serve, reservation of key workers and hiring under quotas, all on the same dates as before.
Prices in a falling currency
Ukraine’s currency lost most of its value in 2014 and 2015. We held our prices for years and then moved to euro equivalents, with a clear list of what is included and an hourly rate for what is not.
Five HR teams, one payroll team
The client’s HR managers and signatories changed several times in thirteen years. Our team did not, and neither did the payroll dates.
What we did
Take over, scale, write it down, run
- Year 1 — Take over. Offer, contract and kick-off within ten weeks. Staff data loaded, payroll moved from the client’s accounting system into ours, and a first feedback meeting with management after five months.
- Years 3–7 — Scale. A branch for the new production site, then four companies in transport, logistics and trading, each onboarded on the same template.
- Years 4–5 — Write it down. A service table of about a hundred items, a responsibility chart, a benchmark of our scope against twelve other payroll providers, and new terms for every company.
- Years 8–14 — Run and recruit. An updated contract with data-protection and force-majeure clauses, senior HR and finance hires for the group alongside payroll, and payroll through the war.
Fourteen years in, the monthly routine is the same one we agreed in the first: lists, calculations, confirmation, acts.
How we work
We do not show you another company’s name
The client, its companies and its people are not named here, and they will not be named in a meeting either. We are glad to talk this project through in detail. What we will not do is discuss the last client that way with you, or you with the next one.
Next step
Running several companies in Ukraine?
Whether it is one entity or twelve, thirty minutes is usually enough to see what a payroll handover would take.
