Topic: Do you think Bitcoin will be used to pay employees? - page 2. (Read 3280 times)

I think there's room in the ecosystem for a service called BitPayroll.

I'd love to offer BTC as payment for our team, but we'd like to get customers paying us in BTC first. If you need a shopping cart that is seamlessly integrated with Bitpay and the traditional payment systems (PayPal, CC gateways, Dwolla, Ogone, etc), please consider going with FoxyCart. The sooner we start getting paid in BTC, the sooner we can offer (at least a portion) of our team member pay in BTC (I blogged about our support here, if you're interested).

Sorry for the self promotion, but this is really important for business owners. If they don't have an inflow of BTC, they can't easily pay it out to their team members and vendors without paying extra in exchange costs, administrative overhead, and the fight against a deflationary currency. Sure, it can be done right now converting USD to BTC every pay period, but it doesn't make as much sense to me from a business standpoint.

Chicken. Egg.

I want a chicken omelet.

What are the difficulties faced in doing this with a company who has never heard of Bitcoin, and probably has no interest in paying out in Bitcoins? Can they pay that pre-tax amount to an exchange? How does it work?

Why not?

Ever heard of unit cost averaging?

It's great how nicely those kind of opportunities lines up with the internet, and leveraging it to work, in general.

in many developed countries where EMPLOYEES have their income tax removed from their wage slip before it hits their bank account. most of these countries have minimum wage laws stating the employee needs to be paid X fiat per hour minimum, making it hard to break away to a bitcoin payment method

but for self employed/contracted work/ temp work this is easier to achieve

I receive part of my salary in Bitcoins.  The simplest way for a company to pay using Bitcoins is to make it an "after tax deduction elected by the employee".  My salary is $X USD.  The company already deducts payroll taxes, income taxes, and benefit premiums.  I elected (by written authorization) to have a certain amount of my salary paid in BTC.  The options my company gave me were a specific USD amount, a specific % of salary, or entire net (after withholding and deductions) amount.  

On Payday the company converts the USD amount to BTC using the volume weighted average exchange rate over the entire pay period.  Our company's program covers all costs and fees but a company could charge a reasonable fee for the service.  I am sure on a long enough timeline payroll companies like ADP will offer this.

Now there are other ways to do this but the advantage of doing it this way is that it is very simply for any company to implement.  All Payroll software allows post tax deductions.  The amount deducted becomes a credit on the company USD books and an equivalent debit is made on the company's BTC books.   The tax implications are already taken care of (other than any capital gains on rising value) as the taxes were based on gross salary.  The company can still deduct the entire cost of the employees salary with no changes to accounting.  

If we are talking about short term projects or contractors, then many, many people are using bitcoin for paying employees. I have even paid for work with BTC.
Earlier I was referring to full time salaried employees. 

Not with the price going up/down by $50 a day.

I think so.  Beginning with those Internet savvy programmers and those who are aware of Bitcoins.  Once this is started, the rest of the employees will know how easy and flexible Bitcoin is and maybe the trend will spread.   One detrimental issue is Bitcoin fluctuations is still too large to be used as such.

It should not be compulsory, but it should be tried as an option. Ultimately, it depends of where you live and what you do with your money. If you get paid in bitcoin, but there are no shops or places accepting bitcoin in your area, you'll have to go to an exchange immediately, so it's not very useful.

There might be more opportunities in an employer opening a bitcoin savings account for its employees.

http://blog.archive.org/2013/02/21/employees-to-be-paid-in-bitcoin-please-donate/

Yeah, it's stated in that blog entry
"The euro amount to be converted into Bitcoins is deducted from the net salary (after taxes) on the employee’s paycheck, similarly as the Finnish lunch vouchers."

If I recall correctly, there's no official statement yet from the Finnish Tax Administration regarding taxation of virtual currencies. Better to be safe than sorry

Cool. Do they officially report their salary payments for tax and everything? Here in the Netherlands, there was a recent public statement from our minister of Finance that salary paid in Bitcoin is subject to taxes, just like salary in euros or other currencies. Which is a good thing, cause it only helps Bitcoin getting more mainstream and generally accepted as money.

Also a Finnish software company SC5 has an option for its employees to receive their salary in Bitcoin.
http://sc5.io/blog/2013/03/sc5-pays-salaries-in-bitcoin/

There's a Dutch company (not Bitcoin related) paying their employees in Bitcoin. Article in Dutch: http://www.nu.nl/tech/3477132/nederlands-bedrijf-betaalt-werknemers-met-bitcoin.html

If they're not bitcoin freaks or reading about last tech they're not going to do this because:

1. Company needs to know about bitcoins and how to use them properly and trust in the security (they're not going to hold a lot of bitcoins if they think a hacker can steal them)
2. Buyer needs to know about bitcoins and how to use them, plus he needs to accept this form of payment.
3. Depends where you live buying is not really easy and sometimes you need to pay a lot of fees, so maybe is going to be easier and cheaper just to use normal method. Or something else.

In the future this will work with bitcoins, I don't doubt about it. But we need more time for this.

That's what I was thinking, I'm surprised that more companies have not done this.

Yes, why not.
I think is a good way to pay your freelance empoyees working in another country.

Wikileaks is one non-btc company doing this
http://www.techcast.org/Commentary.aspx?ID=342