[vortico]

Can confirm. I need to send payments from the US to ~30 international contractors per quarter. I generate a spreadsheet of their names and payment amounts. I click on their name in TransferWise's "saved recipients" page. I copy/paste the amount from the spreadsheet into the USD box, submit the payment, and then copy/paste the payment summary page into an email to the contractor verifying that I paid them. Couldn't be simpler than that.

All of my contractors have previously agreed to pay all fees associated with their payment, so I always type into the USD box. TransferWise withdraws exactly that amount from my bank and in 2-3 seconds tells me the amount that will be deposited into their account.

If hypothetically a new contractor wanted 1M RUB up-front, meaning that I would be responsible for payment fees, I'd simply paste 1000000 into the RUB box, and the recipient will get that exact amount, while TransferWise will calculate and tell me the USD amount to be deducted in my bank. Also couldn't be simpler.

PayPal makes this a nightmare. In order to make a payment such that exactly $1000 USD is withdrawn from my bank, I have to basically apply Newton's algorithm (or successive guessing) to the Send Money page (with each load time being ~30 seconds), because the number you enter is post-fees but pre-exchange. They couldn't have chosen a more useless variable for me to input, since I'd only either want to enter an amount pre-everything in USD or post-everything in RUB. I don't want to enter some weird intermediate amount.

[vsipuli]

With so many international contractors (possibly spread out over different countries and jurisdictions), how do you keep track of your possible tax consequences in both your own and their jurisdictions? How do you ensure you don't become liable to treat them as employees in your and their jurisdictions? Asking out of curiosity, because interested in hiring remote contractors across the globe but fearing possible tax complexity.

[vortico]

Because our contractors provide us a 1-6 month, non-full-time, packaged, isolated service by an agreed deadline for a lump sum, they're very far from the definition of an employee in all countries, so it's not a problem with us. However, if your company starts directing tasks, or otherwise starts creeping toward the fine line, then what happens is out of my expertise, sorry. My useless advice is to stay far from the line, but of course some businesses might not be able to easily do this.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

I will chime in here as well. They seem to manage their relationship with banks rather well. When I was working in the wire unit, everything was usually ready to go in a way requested by the bank and despite working on another continent, any issues tended to be resolved the same day. I never dealt with them as a customer though.

[gchamonlive]

> All of my contractors have previously agreed to pay all fees associated with their payment

out of curiosity, do you have an estimate of how much are those fees?

[vortico]

You're asking about TransferWise? Says on their website. https://transferwise.com/

[gchamonlive]

woah, TransferWise transparency is no joke!