About this site
Fifty notes on hiring through an employer of record, written from the position of the company buying the service. Founders, operations and finance people, hiring managers, and anybody who has found themselves managing somebody another company employs.
What it covers
What the service agreement actually buys and what it leaves with you. The shape of the arrangement: three parties, two contracts, and no document at all between you and the person you work with every day. Which matters travel through the provider, which stay with you, and which fall between the two agreements and are owned by nobody. What each ordinary management act costs in time and in coordination once it has to cross a handoff. And what the three different endings look like.
The argument running through it
Everything that works in this arrangement runs down one side of a triangle. Everything that fails either has to cross a handoff or sits in neither contract. The provider does the part that genuinely needs a local employer and cannot supply the relationship between you and the person, because that relationship is precisely what was not bought. What follows from that has to be built by hand, by you, or it does not exist.
What it is not
It is not legal, tax or employment advice, and it does not tell anybody whether this arrangement suits them. What an employer of record may lawfully do, who counts as the employer for which purpose, whether a client's own activity creates a taxable presence, what happens when a service agreement and an employment contract disagree, what an indemnity is worth, how a termination must be run and whether service transfers on a move to a local entity all differ by jurisdiction, by provider and by the facts, and they change. Those are questions for somebody qualified in the place concerned.
The device at the top of every page works out no proportion and no score, and that is deliberate. What any one agreement covers differs by agreement, and a percentage would be the one number a reader would act on.
It is also not a comparison of providers, a review of any platform, or a recommendation of anybody.
About the examples
Every example used anywhere on this site is an illustration of what one buyer recorded about its own arrangement, labelled as such on the page where it appears. None of it describes any named company, any named provider or any real person, and nothing here claims to say what any authority anywhere would make of anything.
About this domain
The examples on this site illustrate operating questions rather than prescribing a provider, contract or legal conclusion.