Even if you pay the same overseas contractors every month, the work still feels manual: chasing invoices, rechecking bank details, and trying to remember if you properly recorded the last payment. It gets harder when you start to add more international payments, and the process still lives in one person’s head or on a personal spreadsheet. What you need is a repeatable process that multiple people on your team can follow.
To pay international contractors the same way every cycle, you need to work through four steps: confirm what’s due, check recipient details and costs, send, and match the records to your books.
Why repeating the same steps is not enough
If your contractors already get paid every month, it’s fair to ask why anything should change. A habit you repeat can still depend on one person’s memory: which invoice is approved, where a contractor’s new bank details arrived, and how last month’s payment was recorded. The instructions sit in one inbox, and the records are spread across email, a bank account, and a folder only one person knows about.
Preparing, sending, and reconciling are connected responsibilities. Your payment tool handles the send, and your accounting system holds the books. A documented international payment process connects the two, so each step has an owner and a check, and the accounting handoff doesn’t depend on who’s at their desk.
Let’s take Maria as an example. She starts by writing down three things: which contractors are due this cycle, who approves each invoice, and what an authorized backup would need to keep the cycle moving if she were out. That note isn’t her payment system or her books.
If you’re new to the sending side, start with how Remitly Business works.
Put recipient information and responsibilities in one place
Some information stays the same from one cycle to the next. Keep it in one approved place your team can reach: each contractor’s name, contact details, country, agreed currency, payment terms, and invoice references. Limit access to sensitive documents, such as tax forms and bank details, to the people who need them. Your finance lead or tax adviser can tell you which supporting documents apply to each contractor.
Then give each part of the process an owner:
- Preparer: gathers the invoices and confirms what’s due.
- Approver: signs off each invoice and amount.
- Sender: sets up and sends the payments.
- Reconciler: matches each payment to the books.
- Authorized backup: knows where everything is and steps in when a regular owner is out.
A short handoff checklist covers five entries:
- The location of the records and instructions
- The preparation deadline for each cycle
- How approval works
- Who sends the payments
- Who to contact with questions about a payment
It’s your company’s checklist, not a list of product fields.
Maria keeps her checklist in the shared folder her bookkeeper already uses, not in a personal spreadsheet, so her backup can find the instructions and records without asking her.
The backup role is part of your company process, not an account setting: Remitly Business doesn’t offer individual access or team roles for colleagues, and sharing sign-in details isn’t a workaround.
Recipient details and owners carry forward from cycle to cycle. Before every run, check what changes each time, such as invoices, amounts, rates, and sometimes bank details.
Plan each payment run and check what has changed
Familiar recipients and a calendar reminder don’t make a payment ready, approved, or automatic.
Work back from each due date. Allow for each payment’s delivery estimate, where one is shown, and the time your approvals take. Also allow for when money will be available in the bank account or card you pay from, and for days when banks are closed where you and your contractors are.
Remitly Business has no wallet to manage and no balance to pre-fund. Check the funding account instead.
Then run the current-payment checklist, in this order:
- The invoice is approved, and the amount matches it.
- The payee’s name and payout details match your record.
- The agreed currency and the amount the recipient should receive are right.
- The current exchange rate, fees, and total charge are what you expect.
- The funding account can cover the total.
- Where an estimated arrival date is shown, it meets the due date.
If a contractor’s bank details or payment instructions have changed, confirm the change through a contact method you already trust. Use a phone number on file, for example, not the email that announced it. The FBI advises independently verifying payment requests and any change to account numbers or payment procedures.
A disputed invoice, unconfirmed details, or a timing problem needs an owner to resolve it and a message to the contractor, not a rushed send.
This cycle, Maria has three approved invoices ready to go. The fourth contractor emailed new bank details, so she keeps that payment separate until she has confirmed the change by phone.
So which recipients are ready to be paid now? For Maria, it’s three of the four.
Use Bulk Payments to pay international contractors who are ready
Bulk sending is where your payment tool cuts repeated work. Once invoices are prepared and approved, Remitly Business’s Bulk Payments let you send to several contractors in one run. Rather than setting up the same recipients one payment at a time every month, you pick them from your saved list and review the whole run together. The run doesn’t replace the invoice, recipient, and approval checks you’ve already done.
- What it does: The documented bulk workflow is available on desktop and handles up to 20 recipients per payment run.
- Limits: Other payment limits also apply.
- Confirm before you rely on it: Which accounts qualify, and which destination and currency combinations a run can include, can vary, so confirm both before you plan a run around bulk.
The flow has three steps:
- Select saved recipients or add new payees; each one needs full payout details.
- Check the amounts and recipients together.
- Send the run.
A person starts each run. That keeps your preparation and approval steps in place every cycle, because nothing goes out until your sender starts the run.
Maria pays her three ready contractors in one run. She leaves the fourth payment out of the run herself. Once she has verified the new bank details, she’ll send that payment separately.
Close the loop with records your bookkeeper can use
A sent payment still has to arrive and reach your books. A payment moves through three states: initiated, arrived, and reconciled. A sent transfer isn’t matched in your books automatically, so the payment isn’t finished until it’s reconciled.
- Track each transfer until it arrives.
- Keep the supporting evidence: the invoice, the approval, the receipt, and the transfer reference.
- Match the payment to its invoice and to the entry on your bank or card statement.
- Investigate any difference, such as a changed amount or a missing receipt.
- Hand the records to your bookkeeper in the format you’ve agreed.
Remitly Business offers real-time tracking of each transfer and receipts that show your business name, and you can see your payment history in your account. U.S. senders can also download a PDF of their transfers. The PDF gives your bookkeeper supporting records, not a data feed or automatic reconciliation.
A bulk payment is funded with one combined debit, so your bank statement shows one entry for the whole run. Match each payment inside it to its invoice using the transfer records.
Reconciliation means comparing your internal records with your bank records and investigating any differences. To match payment records to your books, ask your bookkeeper which fields they need.
A useful starting list:
- Invoice reference
- Recipient
- Date
- Amounts sent and received, with their currencies
- Exchange rate
- Fees
- Transfer reference
- Status
- Exceptions
These are suggested handoff fields, and a download may not show all of them, so compare a sample with your bookkeeper before you rely on it. Use the format your bookkeeper accepts; if they can’t import your records, manual entry may still work.
Maria’s bookkeeper matches the three completed payments to their invoices and to the single debit for the run. The fourth payment stays open, with Maria as its owner and a date to check on it again.
That open item, and anything that slowed the handoff, is the first thing to look at before the next cycle.
Review the process before the next payment cycle
A documented process stays useful only if you keep it current. Before the next cycle, look back at what went wrong or took longer than it should: late invoices, missing details, unmatched records, exceptions, and work that was done twice. Then update the instructions, contacts, responsibilities, and preparation timing to match, and check that your authorized backup can still find the records.
As your needs grow, you may want additional tools, for example for multi-step approvals, scheduling, payroll, tax handling, or a direct link to your accounting system. Assess them when those needs appear, not when you reach a set number of recipients.
If you change provider or process, test the change first. Send one small test payment and confirm what arrived and when. Then run one cycle in parallel for a few recipients while the rest stay on your current method, and move everyone over once that cycle reconciles. If it’s messy now, it’s messier ten cycles in.
Maria adds two notes for next month: confirm any change to bank details by phone before the run, and send the records to her bookkeeper by the date they need them. The fourth payment stays on her list until it’s resolved.
This is guidance for organizing your own process. It isn’t a substitute for accounting, payroll, tax, or legal advice.
Make the next payment run easier to repeat for business continuity
Could another authorized person on your team run next month’s payments without rebuilding the process from memory? Write down your next run, name its owner, and agree on the bookkeeping handoff before you send. Map your next payment run from invoice to reconciliation, then explore how Remitly Business fits the sending step.
