Ask HN: How do you pay your remote team?
What tools/services do you use your remote team? What does the process look like? Do the employees invoice you first and you make the payment?
There's many apps/services to handle your payroll out there. Gusto comes to mind but I've never used it so I don't know what they're like. Some accountants / CFO firms also may handle payroll for you for a fee.
But really, I don't know your situation so ask that question to an accountant. There may be critical details you're not immediately aware of; your accountant will be.
I can't comment on what they are like from the administrative side, but from an employee perspective, I loved Gusto.
Edit: I’m talking about paying/being paid as a contractor/vendor, not as an employee.
If the US were willing to put tighter rules around bank transfer fees, it would be possible to create a European style system where bank to bank transfers are free, regardless of which bank you're with.
The direct deposit fee is, at most, a couple of dollars per paycheck, and the employer should be paying that.
It's 2019. Paying employees by printed check is as silly as sending day-to-day inter-office communications by fax.
It's not silly, it's a waste of my time - and I value my time, that's why I bill for it in the first place. If I have the choice between a Faster Payment scheme transaction which transfers money generally instantly and always within two hours, and a cheque I have to post/bring to a branch and then wait _days_ for it to clear - I'm going to pick the Faster Payments route.
> Many banks even accept the check deposit via app now
Still a waste of time. Need to wait to receive the cheque. Need to take a photo of it. Need to wait for funds to clear. It's just dumb in 2019, we can do so much better.
>Why would you be OK with giving up a certain percentage of your hard-earned money just because you have to go through the “hassle” of dealing with a piece of paper?
Why on earth do you pay for bank transfers in the US? My bank does not charge for personal transfers. My business account doesn't charge for transfers either. It's such a basic service which costs pence per transaction (easily made up by interest and interchange income).. how could you ever justify charging for it?
In any case, surely it's such an insignificant sum it really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things? The client is paying an invoice presumably a few orders of magnitude larger.
ON the other hand, there are many free (or nearly free) ways to send money between accounts here in the Netherlands.
It's little effort to actually deposit it. But big companies tend to sit in tall towers in the middle of traffic jams, where parking is difficult to find.
As a contractor, I would be fine taking a pay cut of up to $100 to avoid checks.
UK employer here. For payment, I can't think of any way of paying any employees other than via direct bank transfer. I haven't used a cheque (check in the US) for years, and certainly never for paying employees in the last 20 years.
Regular international contractors are paid via Transferwise; irregular contractors are usually paid through PayPal.
I do prefer bank wire transfers, but TransferWise has worked well (to receive money) too, and the smaller businesses I deal with seem unlikely to have free international wire transfers (it’s presumably marketed at bigger businesses)
One of my clients pays me via wire transfer, another does checks, and finally I have one project via moonlightwork.com (awesome service) where they actually handle payments (weekly!) which is pretty cool.
If these are actual W2 full-time employees, I would suggest something like gusto.com to give them direct deposit.
What you do with it afterwards in terms of recording expenses, organising payment etc is your responsibility.
The “easiest” way for you would be if the company setup a presence there and you worked for it.
4 of the last 5 banks I dealt with now let you do mobile deposit, where you can endorse the check and deposit it into your bank account by taking pictures of the check with your smartphone.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That means you need to have registered as a foreign corporation wherever they are working, filed the W9s, W2s and 1099s so that they pay taxes correctly.
If you don't have a payroll processing company or an accountant (don't use ADP) to make sure you're perfectly covered then you should get one ASAP. There aren't too many faster ways to get shut down than to have a state or federal tax agency come hunting you down.
I'd be interested to know what the big remote companies like Elastic do.
In Mexico there are several companies that do that, beware that they usually charge a % of everything you do: Not only salaries, but refunds or any other money movement you want to make.
For full time employees look at using Gusto (https://gusto.com/r/MqwBf/?utm_source=reflink). Note: That's a promo link, we each get $100 Amazon gift card when you sign up and run a payroll.
1) Are they an employee or a contractor? You mention "employees" but talk about them invoicing you. If they are requesting payment via invoice then it sounds like a contractor. It's very important that you define this relationship early on. There are different rules for both (health insurance, paid time off, taxes owed and by who) that are handled very differently. You might have seen a lot in the press about Uber / Lyft etc handling their drivers as contractors and a lot of these reasons are the reason why. So if you're deeming them as contractors (1099s) then make sure you have a contract that makes this explicit. You can find good templates from places like Upcounsel[1], but make sure you have a lawyer take a look.
2) I spoke with the founders of Deel[2] (YC W19) just last week. Their value proposition is that they'll handle the contracts, paperwork and payments (according to your payment schedule) for a small fee (I think $10/m/contractor). This seems like a very good value prop if you hire more than 1 or 2, and one I'm looking into.
3) If you have only a few contractors, then creating a standard contract and making payments to them on submission of their invoice and time sheet (if hourly) is pretty simple. I request our contractors only send invoices monthly to limit the admin for me, and then I pay them via Transferwise (they have a USD-USD beta program that I'm not sure is open to all), because it has cheaper fees than our bank.
4) Assuming you're using a fully fledged accounting/ payroll service or otherwise, then lots of these do have a contractor payment part. The payment part isn't the difficult part, the real benefit of these systems is handling the paperwork with the government for you. We use a full PEO called JustWorks[3] which is awesome - you tell them you have a contractor, you're paying them outside JustWorks and they'll handle all the year end 1099 forms etc.
5) Freelancers. We hire many freelancers to do work for us via Upwork. It's a great tool to get things done, and will do all payments/contracts/compliance for you, for cheap. The downside is the freelancer pays pretty hefty fees, which go down over time [4]. We pay $25/m for all our freelancers paid through the system (30+ freelancers), so it works really well for us.
Happy to answer any other questions you may have!
[1] https://www.upcounsel.com/free-legal-documents [2] https://www.letsdeel.com/ [3] https://justworks.com/features [4] https://www.upwork.com/i/how-it-works/freelancer/
Also checks in general have gone the way of the fax here. I’ve seen only one in the last fifteen years. I would be surprised if people in their 20’s have never seen one.
Solve the problem at hand by writing a check and moving on. In a year things may or may not be different enough to warrant change.
In my home country (Australia) foreign currency cheques apparently take up to 8 weeks to clear.
The bank my Thai business uses say it can take “up to several weeks”.
Sending a check isn’t solving anything it’s creating a fucked situation for the person you’re paying because paper cheque’s are an antiquated method of payment.
In countries outside the US domestic bank transfers are usually free or very cheap with instant - a few days clearing time (we pay about 12 baht on transfers - 38 us cents - scheduled two days ahead, or 20 baht for same day).
Even foreign wire transfers are relatively cheap - I made a $300 “donation” to an open source maintainer last month. I elected to pay the fees at both ends, it cost $36 (and that’s a fixed cost, it’s not % based) and arrived in a different country the same fucking day.
Edit: oh and despite you constantly claiming “no fees” for cheque’s, every bank I’ve checked said they charge a fee for processing a foreign cheque, and none of them specify how much. A bank fee that they won’t tell you before you’re in front of them in the branch is a fee that’s too ridiculous to publicise.
I work remotely and know many people who work remotely for different companies. Most of them are full-time employees.
There's a scale at which more complex tools may make sense. That scale varies with the variation in the details of a company's operation. For a few contractors the overhead of learning and integrating a tool may outweigh the actual (not perceived) benefits.
Most of the work is reviewing invoices, not writing checks.
I sent a weekly invoice through email and I received a check in the mail two to three business days after sending the email.
This is 2019 guys. Get with the program.
Are there any caveats to this that you didn't mention? Are they all contract 1099? What about healthcare and retirement contributions and considerations?
The way you receive your salary at the end of the day (bank transfer or crypto) is completely decoupled from this. In the same way you don't need to tell the taxman what bank did you use to receive your wage, you don't need to tell what cryptocurrency you used (if you don't convert instantly to fiat when receiving it, that will mean you will have more taxable events later, but this is another subject).
This entire thread is insane.
The second a job tries to pay me in crypto is the second I'm looking for another job.
This comment doesn't make sense.
Also...
>if they get compromised, it's not the employer's problem.
Until they can't pay rent which has been known to affect output, or they try and make it your problem (they don't even have to succeed, just trying is enough to be a hassle.)