Ask HN: How do you pay your remote team?

Employees don&#x27;t invoice you, you pay them a salary. Contractors invoice you. If your team is contractors (or you&#x27;re paying them as contractors for tax&#x2F;liability&#x2F;whatever reason), they invoice you and, if you&#x27;re in the US, you should also ask for a tax form (usually a W8 or W9) based on where their tax residency is.<p>There&#x27;s many apps&#x2F;services to handle your payroll out there. Gusto comes to mind but I&#x27;ve never used it so I don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re like. Some accountants &#x2F; CFO firms also may handle payroll for you for a fee.<p>But really, I don&#x27;t know your situation so ask that question to an accountant. There may be critical details you&#x27;re not immediately aware of; your accountant will be.

Please don&#x27;t send checks.. I can&#x27;t think of a more annoying way to get paid! Regardless of the accounting particulars which have been discussed here, there&#x27;s bound to be a much better way of actually paying folks.

Is this a US only question? Are you mixing up employees&#x2F;contractors with onsite local? Employees don&#x27;t invoice you; contractors do.<p>UK employer here. For payment, I can&#x27;t think of any way of paying any employees other than via direct bank transfer. I haven&#x27;t used a cheque (check in the US) for <i>years</i>, and certainly never for paying employees in the last 20 years.<p>Regular international contractors are paid via Transferwise; irregular contractors are usually paid through PayPal.

If your team consist of contractors etc... then they&#x27;ll likely have their own invoice and payment process. I use Freshbooks.<p>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.<p>If these are actual W2 full-time employees, I would suggest something like gusto.com to give them direct deposit.

We have just over twenty remote workers internally and we use a mix. Full disclosure we are a service provider in this space, so I am just taking about what we do internally and freely admit I am biased because of the nature of our business. 1) For short term we engage some folks as independent contractors. They sign a freelance contract, they invoice us each month for their gross earnings and we pay them via international wire transfer. Tax and social security is their responsibility under the contract. We have some contractors who have been on this arrangement more than twelve months and we will try to move them onto employee status this year because of the risk of misclassification. For many tax and labor authorities the contract doesn&#x27;t matter if they view it as an employment relationship. 2) If we have our own entity incorporated in the country where the worker is (UK, Australia) they sign an employment contract and we pay them through the payroll with full tax and social security contributions &amp; deductions. 3) Where we haven&#x27;t got our own entity or don&#x27;t want to run our own payroll yet (USA, Spain, etc) we use a GEO&#x2F;Employer of record service. The employee signs an employment contract with the GEO, the GEO invoices us each month for salary + employer costs + their fees, we pay them and they pay the employee. If you are small or just starting, begin with the first option. It&#x27;s by far the easiest to administer. Eventually as you get bigger and more stable then you will come to a point contracting alone doesn&#x27;t work anymore. Then the blended approach has worked very well for us.

Gusto is great - they have handled all our payroll and contractor payments for our remote team extremely well.

As a contractor I&#x27;ve been paid by cheque, PayPal, and (my favorite) wire transfer. Always this was after sending them an invoice. I found PayPal to be the least friction about invoicing and reminding about due payments, though I lost between 2-3% of my invoice to fees.

I work remotely from Europe for a US company. Even though the company considers me an &quot;employee&quot; with all the perks (vacation, health insurance, etc.) I found that the easiest and best way is for me to form my own LLC, employ myself in it and invoice the US company for the gross amount. Mostly because of lower taxes, easier handling of our national health care and retirement fund, expensing equipment and operational costs.

We use cryptocurrencies, works super well. Typically ETH and BTC.

I&#x27;ve worked from home (if that qualifies as remote) and was on a salary, paid directly to my back account with health, pension benefits, etc, handled by the company. Worked as a contractor for a couple of companies and have been paid using wire transfer and PayPal. My personal preference is wire transfer as it&#x27;s much easier to handle taxes and usually has the least amount of fees and better exchange rates.

Deel came out of the last YC batch. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.letsdeel.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.letsdeel.com&#x2F;</a>

I work for a remote-only company. We use payworks.ca in Canada, and I believe ADP in the USA, for direct deposits.

For the US-based folks on this thread, I think the don&#x27;t-pay-me-with-checks is mostly a non-starter.<p>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.<p>¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

Used to use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitwage.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitwage.com&#x2F;</a> but fees were too high so switched to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;husky.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;husky.io&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m confused by the question because your processes should be in place to pay your people no matter where they are.<p>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.<p>If you don&#x27;t have a payroll processing company or an accountant (don&#x27;t use ADP) to make sure you&#x27;re perfectly covered then you should get one ASAP. There aren&#x27;t too many faster ways to get shut down than to have a state or federal tax agency come hunting you down.

Then startup I worked for used Gusto and then later Sequoia One for payroll.<p>I&#x27;d be interested to know what the big remote companies like Elastic do.

To pay contractors I use Square payroll. Pays out to ACH bank accounts (US only) and handles sending 1099&#x27;s. $5 per contractor per month.<p>For full time employees look at using Gusto (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gusto.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MqwBf&#x2F;?utm_source=reflink" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gusto.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MqwBf&#x2F;?utm_source=reflink</a>). Note: That&#x27;s a promo link, we each get $100 Amazon gift card when you sign up and run a payroll.

We&#x27;ve been very happy with Gusto for payroll + benefits for our salaried remote team.

Transferwise, just regular payments twice a month, no need for an invoice every time

We hire a number of folks both as traditional contractors as well as freelancers. Here&#x27;s some thoughts based on my experience:<p>1) Are they an employee or a contractor? You mention &quot;employees&quot; but talk about them invoicing you. If they are requesting payment via invoice then it sounds like a contractor. It&#x27;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 &#x2F; Lyft etc handling their drivers as contractors and a lot of these reasons are the reason why. So if you&#x27;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.<p>2) I spoke with the founders of Deel[2] (YC W19) just last week. Their value proposition is that they&#x27;ll handle the contracts, paperwork and payments (according to your payment schedule) for a small fee (I think $10&#x2F;m&#x2F;contractor). This seems like a very good value prop if you hire more than 1 or 2, and one I&#x27;m looking into.<p>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&#x27;m not sure is open to all), because it has cheaper fees than our bank.<p>4) Assuming you&#x27;re using a fully fledged accounting&#x2F; payroll service or otherwise, then lots of these do have a contractor payment part. The payment part isn&#x27;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&#x27;re paying them outside JustWorks and they&#x27;ll handle all the year end 1099 forms etc.<p>5) Freelancers. We hire many freelancers to do work for us via Upwork. It&#x27;s a great tool to get things done, and will do all payments&#x2F;contracts&#x2F;compliance for you, for cheap. The downside is the freelancer pays pretty hefty fees, which go down over time [4]. We pay $25&#x2F;m for all our freelancers paid through the system (30+ freelancers), so it works really well for us.<p>Happy to answer any other questions you may have!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upcounsel.com&#x2F;free-legal-documents" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upcounsel.com&#x2F;free-legal-documents</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.letsdeel.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.letsdeel.com&#x2F;</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;justworks.com&#x2F;features" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;justworks.com&#x2F;features</a> [4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upwork.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;how-it-works&#x2F;freelancer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upwork.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;how-it-works&#x2F;freelancer&#x2F;</a>

Check out Veem.com

Check, envelope, and stamp is the simplest thing that might work.

gitcoin

Most remote workers are independent contractors, and they generally invoice you.

We use cryptocurrencies. Fast. Free. Immutable and provable.<p>This is 2019 guys. Get with the program.