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Comment by sontek | Hacker News Reader

I started my company fully remote but doing payroll in multiple countries is a pain. Have you solved this? I'm limiting my employees to the areas I've already registered with the proper authorities and not hiring in any other locations.

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Most of the entrepreneurs I know avoid this problem by not hiring employees - they use contract labor sourced from Upwork, which handles the paperwork of dealing with different countries & currencies. There are some challenges around communication, management, finding good people, etc, but once you find someone you can get a very loyal worker for a low price. A Cambodian programmer making $15/hour can live like a king - that's 12x the median income for their country, or the equivalent of an American making about $720K/year, so they have a strong incentive to work hard and not fuck it up.

In US we do payroll. For other countries the employees are legally contractors, though still with equity and not treated any differently from anyone else on the team

We do the same, and the foreign employees take care of their own tax/benefits. We pay enough that this is worth it to them and makes the admin on the company side much more manageable.

> For other countries the employees are legally contractors

How do you actually pay them as contractors? Do you literally just wire them USD or do you some service?

Not OP, but we are fully remote with a similar sized company and we just wire USD every month after they send us invoices. It’s pretty easy.

Hire them as contractors with equity. Pay them their accounting costs + health insurance amount + voluntary pension plan if you want to emulate their countries' typical deductions.

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