Avis Budget Group: huge payroll time-savings with integrated CloudPay and Workday systems
“The real difference with CloudPay is that you listen and adapt.
– Anett Duró
Global Payroll Director, Avis Budget Group
Initially established in the USA in 1946, vehicle rental company Avis Budget Group (ABG) is now a global force, operating in more than 180 countries around the world. International Payroll Director Anett Duró joined the business in 2018 and is responsible for ABG’s 21 international corporate countries. We caught up with her to discuss ABG’s relationship with CloudPay.
You can read the full case study below the overview.
An overview of Avis Budget Group’s global payroll journey with CloudPay
Challenges
- The organization operated with multiple systems, creating opportunities for improvement in efficiency and automation.
- Reporting capabilities varied across regions, highlighting a need for greater global standardization and visibility.
- Managing payroll across numerous locations required sizable internal resources, presenting an opportunity to optimize costs and team structures.
CloudPay Solution
- Real-time integration with Workday HR system allows seamless data transfer with the CloudPay platform, with time-saving automations, standardized validation processes and instant reporting capabilities
Results
- Time saving of approximately 60% across combined payroll and payroll / HR activities
- Creation of resource-efficient regional payroll hubs, helped to stabilize and manage challenging in-country payrolls with support from CloudPay subject matter experts
- Typical data point error reduction of approximately 40-50% since 2023
Since 2021…
1,182
payroll runs delivered
254,403
payslips delivered
Anett Duró
Global Payroll Director,
Avis Budget Group
With a more efficient payroll process, our team has been able to shift their focus from manual tasks to more impactful work across the organization.”
Connectivity and consistency: ABG’s drive for standardized and streamlined payroll
As a fast-paced international business, Avis Budget Group was looking to streamline and future-proof its global payroll operations. To support their ambition, they needed a partner who could bring consistency, cohesion, and scalability to a complex global payroll landscape.
A key priority was achieving greater standardization across their international payroll processes, moving away from disconnected systems that resulted in differing output file formats for each of their international payroll countries; the subsequent non-value-adding tasks of manual processing, fixing and validating errors were resulting in time lost each month for payroll teams and managers.
Centralized, automated reporting was also high on the agenda – ABG sought a solution that would provide real-time insights and unified data across all markets without the need for manual consolidation.
Additionally, they were ready to move beyond traditional file-based payments and were looking for a payroll provider that could offer a comprehensive integrated payroll and treasury solution.
To make this vision a reality, Avis Budget Group had a clear set of requirements: a centralized reporting tool, seamless integration and certification with Workday, and a collaborative partnership built on modern technology and exceptional service. They were seeking a “21st Century” payroll provider – one that could keep pace with their global operations and support the company’s evolving workforce, enabling teams to work more efficiently and freeing up time for strategic work.
Global payroll partner selection: why Avis Budget Group chose CloudPay
ABG’s initial RFP process for their new payroll provider started in early 2021. As Anett explained, “At the time, payroll didn’t have a centralized home. It was clear we had an opportunity to bring more structure and alignment to our payroll operations.”
Following initial discussions, ABG narrowed its choice down to two potential payroll providers. During the selection process, a wide-ranging ABG team – including HR, Finance, and Payroll functions – was heavily involved to ensure the right decision was made. Country reviews were requested, during which local HR Directors and Payroll Managers could ask questions and share what they wanted to see improved with this new provider.
“CloudPay brought multiple Subject Matter Experts into our conversations, which gave us confidence that we were getting the full picture.”
As a result, based on a combination of both CloudPay’s product solutions and managed service capabilities, ABG’s internal evaluation and scoring system confirmed comprehensively that CloudPay was the preferred provider to proceed with.
Transforming Avis Budget Group’s global payroll operations: working with CloudPay
During the onboarding process which began in January 2022, the CloudPay team worked closely with Avis Budget Group, ensuring access to and facilitating phone calls with the most relevant individuals, helping to avoid long and complex email chains and the potential misinterpretation these can lead to.
“We organized lots of input review and control calls where necessary, to get to the best rhythm between the teams to ensure we were working together in the best way.”
CloudPay now provides Avis Budget Group with managed payroll services for 18 international countries, with integrated payments services for seven of these. Further implementations are underway.
Having worked together since 2021, as of February 2025, CloudPay has delivered just under 1,200 payroll runs and more than a quarter of a million payslips for ABG.
Payroll hubs creation
Data error reductions
Reporting and analytics functionality
Automation
CloudPay service
CloudPay’s Workday integration – sending all data inputs automatically to CloudPay – has helped Avis Budget Group create regional payroll hubs with remote teams. CloudPay’s standardized validation process, unified platform and Workday integration help team members to manage multiple payrolls, maximizing team resource efficiency while maintaining as much payroll knowledge in the hubs as possible.
“One of the main reasons we’re able to move in this direction is because of the CloudPay Platform. The process, reports, and input files are consistent across countries, so we already have a strong understanding of what’s required. We follow the payroll calendar, we have experienced payroll professionals, and we know what needs to be done.”
These hubs now allow ABG’s payroll managers to better review and refine processes in their regions, facilitating improvements with smaller teams – this was part of a significant process shift for ABG.
“With the new payroll hubs, a handful of people are now processing payrolls for five or six countries and learning each other’s payrolls. It was a huge change – some team members had spent 20 years working on a single country’s payroll and couldn’t imagine having to pick up others.”
Having supported the localized vendor to global payroll journey, standardizing processes across ABG’s international payroll countries, CloudPay has been able to support the change management process required and help dramatically reduce data errors to provide a much more stable and consistent payroll process. Taking averages across all ABG data points from January 2023 to March 2025, errors have seen significant stabilization with typical reductions of 40-50% across the board.
One data point, for example, was time-based payments causing a particularly high number of errors, due to the manual templates that were previously being submitted. Using CloudPay’s analysis tools, our teams worked together to identify and support the most effected countries – moving away from the previous localized data provision model and migrating to PECI integration where possible, providing a more globalized approach with far fewer errors.
Another key advantage for ABG has been CloudPay’s immediate availability of reporting data: “Day-to-day payroll operation reports are just how they need to be. I really appreciate the prepared reports, like the variance report – it helps us stay on top of inputs and quickly flag any potential issues.”
Previously, system limitations meant that data required for employee pay comparison reports took three months to be collated and sent: “With CloudPay, we can extract the information we need, in the right format, and it’s just there.”
Automation abilities have also been pivotal for Avis Budget Group; Workday has become ABG’s single source of truth. Workday’s Payroll Effective Change Interface (PECI) standardized integration enables the automated transfer of employee data changes—such as salary adjustments, new hires, terminations, and benefit updates—from Workday to payroll systems via batch processing.
PECI bi-directional communication allows CloudPay’s system to send confirmation receipts or error notifications back to Workday, ensuring data integrity and prompt resolution of discrepancies. This has played a pivotal role in bringing cohesion and connectivity to previously disparate and fragmented systems.
By eliminating manual data entry, Avis Budget Group’s PECI integrated payrolls have benefited from enhanced accuracy and a reduced administrative workload, as well as enhanced compliance with evolving tax and regulatory requirements.
Open, honest, and transparent dialogue throughout has been key to forging a successful payroll transformation, with both the ABG and CloudPay teams continually working to identify and implement improvements. In addition to fast, direct, and focused dialogue with their CloudPay Customer Success Manager, a regular cadence of update and review meetings has been established, tailored to ABG’s requirements.
As our work together has developed, CloudPay’s communication and responsiveness has proven particularly valuable for Anett:
“The real difference between CloudPay is that you listen and adapt. The feedback from our payroll countries has been positive – which tell us this process is working as it should.”
Connecting systems and adding value: Avis Budget Group + CloudPay
Avis Budget Group’s strategic collaboration with CloudPay has seen a global payroll transformation: from a disparate array of systems and labor-intensive manual tasks to a standardized, centralised approach driven by automation – as Anett described: “Our systems are finally connected”.
Ultimately, this approach has “eliminated the non-value-adding tasks that we were doing”, driving efficiencies throughout the pay process for ABG.