What is the cheapest way to pay sub-contractor abroad

[Lumiere]

Hi

I outsourced some work to abroad, what is the cheapest way to pay their invoices ?
They are outside of the EU, can only accept payments in USD.

As it stands in the moment, I need to pay HSBC a monthly fee of £6 to enable international payments, then there is a £24 fee per payment, then I would lose further 2% due to bad exchange rate.

Would something like this work and be acceptable for the accounting purposes:
My Co HSBC GBP -> FX exchange -> Subcontractor
or
My Co HSBC GBP -> FX exchange -> My Co new USD account -> Subcontractor

I only need to pay 1-3 invoices max, so an easy setup preferred.

Thanks

[eek]

Paypal?

[Lumiere]

Paypal?

That would be the easiest, but I though the money should come out of the company bank account ? I can't just transfer money to my personal paypal and pay the company invoice from there, or can I ?

[eek]

That would be the easiest, but I though the money should come out of the company bank account ? I can't just transfer money to my personal paypal and pay the company invoice from there, or can I ?

Why not? You could also open a company paypal account...

[SimonMac]

Western Union?

FTFY?

[eek]

FTFY?

I know enough scare stories over the years that I would never recommend them

[Lumiere]

Just checked, it looks that they can't receive money on paypal there, only send.

[d000hg]

Are you sure it's £24 per international payment? I paid £17 to send money to Russia.

If you are sending multiple payments per month, you could sign up for HSBCnet instead of using online banking. Instead of £6/month it's £15 but your fees on each payment are lower.

You could also look at using a different bank, just for this stuff, as the fees vary quite a bit.

What I prefer to do is try to make sure payments are at least $400, preferably $1000+, since the fees are the same. It's really an unavoidable cost of business and I can't be bothered mucking about with 3rd-party providers other than PayPal.

[northernladuk]

Don't want to be rude but why the hell didn't you sort this out BEFORE you outsourced the work?

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

That would be the easiest, but I though the money should come out of the company bank account ? I can't just transfer money to my personal paypal and pay the company invoice from there, or can I ?

Set up a business PayPal account. Or just accept that you're going to lose a few hundred quid in charges - that's the cost of doing business I guess. Presumably you're still making a decent margin on the sub-contracted work or is it really that tight?