Ep: 287: Quick Guide To Paying Your OFS

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 287, quick guide to paying your OFS. So, to me, paying people is the easiest part of this. But I can understand why in the beginning, if you haven't done it before, you might be concerned about it. I wasn't concerned about it when I started because I had an agency and I had to pay them through the agency. But when my OFS quit the agency and wanted to come work for me directly, then I was concerned and I asked him. I don't really know how to pay you, but you can pay through so many options. You can pay through PayPal or Western Union or wise.com or our favorite, EasyPay, which is built into onlinejobs. Ph. Because we built it how we wanted to be paying people. It doesn't really matter which of these services you use. They're all going to get the money to your ofs. Your OFS is always going to be able to withdraw the money, and any of these services will take care of that for you. Just don't wire money and don't prepay for work. People often think wiring is a good option. It's not a good option. It's, number one, super expensive. Number two, Filipinos are very concerned about wiring money. They've learned that wiring money means it's a scam. So, next, how often and how much? Well, so how much you pay them depends on how much you negotiate with. How often you pay them is the same thing. Depends on what you negotiate with them. We pay our people either once a month or twice a month. So every two weeks or once a month, on the first of the month, almost all of our people are salaried, so we pay them the same amount each month, and then we give them yearly raises. If they're hourly, they track their hours and they tell us how much they've worked, and then we pay them based off of that also. So in the beginning, if you're just starting, I really highly recommend paying someone weekly for the first two months. Now, don't prepay so they do. You hire them, they do a week of work, then you pay them for that week of work that they just did. And there's a couple reasons for this. Number one, it lets them trust you, so they're very scared about getting scammed. And if they do a full month's work without getting any payment, wow, that's a lot of risk on their part. They're putting a lot out there and that's hard for them. So if you're willing to pay them once a week for the first couple months, that's a really good thing for them. It also is a really good out for you. So like, if it's not working out, you can say, hey, look, this is the last payment. This is just isn't working out. You know, you're two or three weeks in, you can say, hey, here's your payment. This isn't working. I'm going to go a different direction. And then rather than being a full month in or two months in, it's easier to walk away after those two months. It's easy to switch to bimonthly or to monthly payments. PayPal is usually a top of mind category, like for payments, because everybody knows PayPal. I actually really, really don't recommend it. And more and more I see people in the Philippines asking their employers, can you pay me some other way? Not through PayPal. PayPal's fees are really high and they're really good at hiding them. They don't actually show you what the fees are. You have to like send a payment and then compare it with another payment in order to figure out how much PayPal is actually sending. And their fees are usually like 5 to 7%. So it's pretty high. And then in terms of payment systems, I do recommend EasyPay is built into your OnlineJobs PH account. We built it the way that we wanted it to work. We actually had to partner with payoneer to make it work. Payoneer has a couple other fees which we negotiated away. So if you're using EasyPay through OnlineJobs ph, the only thing there is is a 2% foreign exchange that happens when they withdraw their money from their account. You're sending the actual exchange rate. We also force them to send the money really quickly so your OFS should get it within 24 hours. It's a good system. Another really good1iswise.com. Look, I can't cover every payment thing here. I know some of you guys are going to say like, oh, what about Remit Home or Remitly or Western Union or whatever? And you can use any of those. They're all fine. I'm just giving you the ones that we use or we have used or that I commonly see used for any of these. Most people just hook their bank account to it. You put in your bank account number and routing number into the service and then it'll automatically withdraw the money from your bank account when you send a payment. It's super easy and convenient and it's secure on all of them. This keeps fees minimal except with PayPal, and it also makes transactions happen super fast. You can use a credit card with most of these, but it's going to charge you an extra 3% fee. So not super great. And then the last thing I want to talk about is pay on time. Don't be late with your payments. In the Philippines, they budget based off of when they're going to get their money. And if you don't send a payment, well, like if you're three or four or five days late, your team member might not eat for three or four or five days. So just be on time with your payments and encourage them if you can encourage some sort of budgeting so that they can be saving some money. And at some point you might want to even talk with them about saving some money and talk about how much you're sending them and how it's getting used. And all of this can be done. Probably not in the beginning, but as you move down the road, it'll help you with your raises, it'll help you with knowing exactly what they're doing and how their life style is. And sometimes it'll prevent, like having catastrophes, although usually we don't do this until we actually have a catastrophe fee with our people. So I hope that's helpful on how to pay people. If you have questions, let me know. Johnlinejobs phone.