HR Shared Services Singapore

Both hand a function over. The difference is which one.

HR Shared Services is the HR function specifically, run under our MOM employment agency licence, which is what lets us file and manage work passes as part of the engagement. If you employ foreign staff, that matters.

BPO is broader and less HR-specific. Reception, office administration, document handling and data entry can all sit inside it, with payroll as one component among several rather than the centre of the arrangement.

Employers with a foreign workforce almost always want the first. Employers whose staff are entirely local, and whose real problem is a back office rather than an HR department, usually want the second.

Your employees stay your employees. Nothing about their contracts, seniority or entitlements changes because we now administer the payroll and the records.

Our employees are the people delivering the service. They sit on our payroll and we carry the employment risk for them.

Where you want us to be the legal employer of people working in your business, that is a different arrangement entirely and runs through Employer of Record.

The standalone work pass service is per filing. You keep your HR function in house and engage us only when there is an application, a renewal or an appeal. No retainer, no minimum.

HR Shared Services absorbs work pass administration into a wider engagement. The filings happen as part of the monthly cycle alongside payroll and the employee lifecycle, on a retainer rather than per application.

Volume usually decides it. A handful of filings a year is cheaper standalone. A steady pipeline alongside an HR function you would rather not run is the case for bundling.

Twelve-month minimum term, with one month of fees held as a refundable deposit for the duration.

The fee follows headcount, which functions are in scope, and how much work pass and statutory activity your workforce generates. An employer with mostly foreign staff produces more compliance work than one with none, and the pricing reflects that.

Everything is in the engagement letter before onboarding starts: fee schedule, service levels, and what is inside and outside scope. Adding or removing a function later is a documented variation.

Employee records sit in access-controlled systems, with permissions limited to the people delivering your engagement rather than open across the operation.

Handling follows the Personal Data Protection Act. Retention periods, access rights and breach procedures are written into the engagement letter rather than left to internal policy, and CPF, IR8A and work pass data carry the tighter handling the Act requires for it.

When an engagement ends your data returns to you in an agreed format and our copies are disposed of on a documented schedule, agreed at the start rather than negotiated at the end.

Almost nobody starts from a clean sheet. There is usually a payroll vendor, a spreadsheet somebody maintains, and an HR executive who has quietly become the only person who knows how leave accrual really works.

So we map what exists first, undocumented parts included, because those are what break at cutover. Then data migration, workflow configuration, and a full cycle run alongside whatever is running today.

Cutover follows the parallel reconciliation, never precedes it. Where several vendors are being consolidated we sequence it, usually taking payroll first and folding the remaining functions in over the next cycles rather than moving everything on a single date.