Paying subcontractors and delivery partners on a single build

A larger build rarely stays in-house. To deliver on scope and deadline, you pull in subcontractors and offshore or nearshore delivery partners — a specialist here, a small team there — each tied to a specific engagement and milestone. They sit in different countries, invoice in different currencies, and run on different billing cycles.

That is a sensible way to staff a project, but it makes payment messy. A single payout run can touch several currencies at once, each conversion carries a markup, and matching every payment back to the right project line becomes its own job. This guide is about the per-project, project-scoped side of subcontracting — partners brought in for a particular engagement — rather than a standing roster of contractors you pay every month regardless of project.

The per-project shape of the problem

The defining feature here is that the cost belongs to a project, not to your ongoing overhead. You bring in a delivery partner to build a module, an offshore team to cover a workstream, a specialist to handle one phase. When the engagement ends, so does the cost. The next project assembles a different mix of partners.

That makes each subcontractor payment something you need to tie back to a specific engagement and milestone — both to protect the project's margin and to know whether the work you have subcontracted is actually covered by what the client is paying you for it.

Where FX markups and round-trips eat the budget

When partners across several countries invoice in their own currencies, the naive approach is to convert from your home balance for each payment. Do that across a batch and you pay a conversion spread on every single line, often at the worst possible point — the moment the payment is due.

• Each payout converts separately, so the markup is charged again and again.
• If you collected the client money in one currency and pay partners in several others, you may convert twice — once in, once out — a round-trip that quietly shaves the project budget.
• Timing is forced: payments go out when invoices fall due, not when the rate is sensible.

Holding the currencies your partners actually invoice in lets you pay them directly from a balance in that currency, avoiding the repeated round-trip conversions on a batch.

Taming the reconciliation overhead

The second cost is administrative. Several partners, several currencies and several billing cycles produce a stream of payments that all need matching back to the right project, the right milestone and the right client invoice. Done by hand across scattered accounts, this is slow and error-prone, and it is exactly where project margins get lost track of.

Paying project subcontractors as a batch from one place — rather than chasing individual transfers across multiple accounts — keeps the records in one stream and makes it far easier to tie each cost to its engagement.

Ring-fence subcontractor cost by engagement

Because the cost is project-scoped, it helps to treat it that way in your money too. Setting aside the funds for a project's subcontractors — ideally from the client payments tied to that same project — keeps the cost mapped to the engagement rather than blurred into general spending.

This does two things. It stops one project's partner costs being paid out of another project's collections, and it gives you a clear, per-engagement view of whether subcontracted work is covered by the revenue it relates to. When the project closes, the picture is clean.

How Altery fits

Altery is not a bank, and this is general information rather than advice, but it lines up well with project-scoped subcontracting. Global and mass payouts let you pay a batch of partners from a single balance instead of chasing individual transfers across accounts. Multi-currency accounts let you hold the currencies your partners invoice in — USD, EUR, GBP and more — so you can pay directly and avoid round-trip conversions on each line. And ring-fencing funds into per-project pots lets you map subcontractor cost to the specific engagement and the client payments it relates to.

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