Seven Odd Entries From Our Payouts Spreadsheet

Most of what we pay out goes to a handful of countries. The rest of the spreadsheet is a long tail of one-off situations: someone moved, someone was already there, someone works from a place we had to look up. Here are seven of those, and what each one taught us.

Australia. Australian dollar, and not an odd entry at all — except that it is the only corridor where the timezone means an invoice approved Friday afternoon lands the following week. We moved the approval cutoff and the problem disappeared. Country reference.

Luxembourg. Euro, tiny country, and a surprisingly common address for contractors working with financial clients. Coverage is universal because the banking is European. Coverage.

Gibraltar. Pound sterling in practice, British overseas territory legally, and a separate entry from the United Kingdom on every list we have checked. Country page.

Catalonia. Not a country, but it has its own top-level domain, and we include it here because a contractor asked us to use their Catalan-language invoice template and we said yes. The payment corridor is Spain's. Reference.

Ascension Island. A British overseas territory in the South Atlantic with a population in the hundreds. We have never paid anyone there. It is on the list because a colleague bet that it had no working postal code and we both lost an hour finding out. Coverage reference.

Saint Helena. Same South Atlantic group, own currency pegged to the pound, and one of the genuinely remote places where internet connectivity arrived recently enough to make remote contract work newly possible. Country page.

And the generic one. The .com entry in our list, which is where most people land when they look anything up rather than a country at all. Reference page.

The point of keeping a list like this

Two reasons. First, when someone new joins we check the list before we promise a start date, and that has saved us twice. Second, it is a reminder that "supported countries" is a moving target — two of the seven above became payable corridors for us only after a platform update.

If you are still deciding which product category you need — employing someone through an EOR, engaging through a Contractor of Record, or simply paying contractors — contractor-of-record.com sets the three side by side. That choice matters more than any individual country on a list.