Silensec Cut Multi-Country Payroll From One Week to 30

Challenge

Silensec Africa and Cyber Ranges Africa provide information security consultancy and training across Africa. As Finance Manager for both entities, Iddy was responsible for getting payroll right across Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. Each country has its own tax rules, statutory deductions and filing requirements. For a long time, that work ran on a manual system.

The main challenges and risks included errors being experienced while completing payroll manually, and the issue of not having tax experts in all three countries to compute the correct taxes and pay employees the correct salaries. Because Silensec was not physically based in all the countries where it employed people, statutory deductions were harder to manage. Rates change, thresholds move, new contributions get introduced, and when the finance team is not in the market, those changes are easy to miss.

Two risks pushed Silensec to look for a better solution: the errors from manual payroll processing and the lack of local tax expertise in all three countries. These risks compound quickly—a manual process increases the chance of mistakes, and a lack of local tax expertise makes those mistakes harder to prevent. The result is exposure on both sides: employees may receive incorrect salaries, and the business may face compliance issues later.

Based on my experience, I would recommend Workpay to other companies because of the time saving. It would take me like a week to compute payroll across the three regions. Now it takes me less than 30 minutes to do it. — Iddy Wycliffe, Finance Manager, Silensec

We only needed to upload the details on Workpay, and it worked. By the end of that very month, all the employees were paid their salaries. And we also complied with the regulations in that country. — Iddy Wycliffe, Finance Manager, Silensec

We will not require to have expertise in those countries. We just need to select the specific country, and Workpay will do the rest. — Iddy Wycliffe, Finance Manager, Silensec

Silensec Workpay

Solution

Silensec chose Workpay to bring both entities and all three branches onto one payroll platform. Instead of rebuilding payroll knowledge country by country, Silensec now uses Workpay to apply local statutory deductions, manage country-specific payroll rules and process salaries from one system.

The implementation allowed Silensec to eliminate the issue of having resources in each country doing payroll, because they could handle both entities and three branches of the companies on the same platform by simply switching the account. When management decided to move consultants onto payroll just days before month-end, Silensec did not need to rebuild a local process. The employee details were uploaded into Workpay, the platform applied Tanzania's payroll rules, and employees were paid as employees by the end of the same month.

The setup consolidated entities and branches onto one system, applying local statutory rules and enabling payroll processing in minutes rather than days.

Results

Silensec achieved significant time savings and operational improvements:

- Reduced payroll processing time from one week across three regions to less than 30 minutes
- Successfully converted consultants to employees in Tanzania within days before month-end, ensuring compliance
- Eliminated the need for local payroll expertise in each country
- Consolidated two entities and three branches onto a single platform
- Enabled rapid expansion without rebuilding payroll infrastructure country by country
- Improved accuracy and reduced manual errors in payroll processing
- Freed up finance team time from repetitive payroll administration to higher-value work