Mercans Unveils AI Engine That Turns Global Time Data Into Payroll-Ready Truth

Global payroll teams have long lived with an uncomfortable truth: time and attendance data is easy to collect, but painfully hard to interpret—especially across borders. Mercans is betting that era is finally over.

This week, Mercans, a global leader in payroll technology, workforce management, and HR SaaS, announced the launch of its next-generation Workforce Management (WFM) and Leave Management Engine, which the company says is the first platform capable of evaluating unevaluated time and attendance data against any country’s labor laws and client-specific policies—and converting it into payroll-ready transactions automatically.

If that sounds technical, it is. But the implication is simple and significant: global employers may no longer need to manually interpret time data country by country before payroll can run.

Why Time and Attendance Has Been a Global Weak Spot

Most time and attendance systems do one thing well: capture raw data. Clock-ins, clock-outs, breaks, absences, and leave requests are logged accurately. What happens next is where things fall apart.

Traditional systems stop short of interpretation. They don’t evaluate whether hours qualify as overtime under local law, whether a shift violates rest-period regulations, or how collective bargaining agreements change pay entitlements. That work is typically handled manually—often offline—by payroll teams applying local heuristics, spreadsheets, and last-minute adjustments.

The result is a familiar mix of problems:

• High error rates

• Inconsistent rule application

• Payroll delays

• Elevated compliance and audit risk

• Limited scalability as organizations expand internationally

Mercans’ new engine is designed to address this gap directly.

From Raw Time to Evaluated Time—Automatically

At the core of the new platform is a fundamental shift in approach. Instead of treating time evaluation as a downstream payroll activity, Mercans elevates it into a central, rules-driven intelligence layer.

The engine ingests unevaluated workforce data from any source—time clocks, mobile apps, third-party systems—and applies thousands of jurisdiction-specific and client-defined rules to produce fully evaluated time transactions.

These rules account for:

• National and local labor laws

• Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs)

• Company-specific policies

• Exception handling and special conditions

The output isn’t just cleaner data—it’s legally and contractually evaluated time that payroll systems can consume immediately.

Universal Rule Intelligence at Global Scale

One of the platform’s most ambitious claims is universal rule coverage.

According to Mercans, the engine supports any country, any labor regulation, and any client policy framework, covering complex scenarios such as:

• Working time limits

• Multiple overtime tiers

• Night and weekend work

• Public holidays and shift premiums

• On-call and rest-period rules

• Leave accruals and entitlements

This matters because global organizations rarely operate under a single set of rules—even within the same country. CBAs, regional laws, and internal policies can all apply simultaneously, creating layers of complexity that legacy systems weren’t designed to handle.

AI-Driven Time Evaluation, Not Just Automation

Mercans describes the platform as AI-driven, but not in the generative sense dominating headlines. Instead, the intelligence lies in how the system classifies and evaluates time.

The engine automatically converts raw timestamps into structured outcomes such as regular hours, overtime categories, premiums, statutory exceptions, and contractual adjustments. That classification happens consistently, transparently, and at scale.

For payroll and compliance teams, the practical benefit is fewer downstream corrections—and far fewer surprises on payday.

Unifying Time, Attendance, and Leave Logic

Another differentiator is the platform’s unified evaluative framework for time, attendance, leave, and absences.

Rather than handling leave as a separate workflow, the engine evaluates statutory leave, contractual leave, special leave types, and country-specific accrual models within the same rules framework used for working time. This reduces fragmentation and ensures that leave impacts payroll, entitlements, and compliance consistently.

In highly regulated environments, that kind of alignment is difficult to achieve with bolt-on systems.

Payroll-Ready by Design

The end result of Mercans’ approach is payroll-ready output.

The platform generates fully evaluated, auditable transactions that can flow directly into payroll, ERP, and finance systems—eliminating the need for manual reconciliations and last-mile adjustments.

Equally important for large enterprises, every transaction includes a complete rule trace and compliance logic trail, making the system audit-friendly by default. That traceability supports statutory audits, internal controls, and governance requirements that are often afterthoughts in time systems.

Rethinking a Long-Held Assumption

“For decades, global employers have accepted that time and attendance must be manually interpreted country by country. We rejected that assumption,” said Tatjana Domovits, Group CEO at Mercans.

“This engine does not just track time. It understands time in the context of law, policy, and contractual obligation. It creates a single global language for workforce transactions.”

That idea—a single, evaluated language for time—is the platform’s most compelling promise. If successful, it could simplify one of the most stubbornly complex areas of global HR operations.

Built for Complex, Regulated Enterprises

Mercans is positioning the new engine squarely at organizations with the most to gain—and the most to lose—from payroll errors:

• Multinational enterprises

• Distributed and hybrid workforces

• Highly regulated industries

• Organizations pursuing compliance-first HR and payroll strategies

A notable architectural choice is the separation of data capture from rule evaluation. Clients can continue using their preferred front-end time capture tools while relying on Mercans as the single source of truth for evaluated workforce data.

That flexibility lowers adoption friction and allows enterprises to modernize evaluation logic without ripping out existing systems.

The Bigger HR Tech Implication

Mercans’ launch reflects a broader trend in HR and payroll technology: intelligence is shifting upstream. Instead of cleaning data at the end of the process, platforms are increasingly focused on embedding compliance and logic at the point of interpretation.

As global workforces expand and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, this shift may move from “nice to have” to necessary infrastructure.

The Bottom Line

With its new Workforce and Leave Management Engine, Mercans is challenging a long-standing limitation in global HR tech: the idea that time data must always be manually interpreted before it becomes usable.

By automating the evaluation of time against laws, contracts, and policies—across countries and clients—the platform promises cleaner payrolls, lower compliance risk, and a more scalable foundation for global work.

For enterprises struggling to reconcile time, attendance, leave, and payroll across borders, this launch signals a meaningful evolution—and a reminder that sometimes the hardest problems are the ones we’ve simply learned to live with.

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