A Guide to Managing Foreign Payments: What to Do After Receiving International Payments

The 2026 World Development Report by the World Bank argues that AI is fast-tracking innovation for plenty of firms, but that firms with concentrated development and systems are poised for long-term success and integration. This is good news for local IT and tech SMEs that are looking to scale globally.

With the use of multi-entity models for IT businesses, and the advent of remote work that rose during the pandemic, locating global talent is no longer as big of a challenge as it used to be. To add, the incoming Gen Z workforce is mostly self-taught in nature, with 70% of Gen Z participants surveyed by Stack Overflow having learned to code via YouTube. This opens up the IT talent pool with a vast selection of candidates who are proficient in technology and IT-based practices.

Offering IT services usually means working with talent and contractors remotely, so shifting into a multi-entity model makes the most sense as a next step for MSMEs of this nature. However, competition for global talents that specialize in IT, AI and broader technological systems is both tight and saturated at the same time.

In fact, 43% of the world’s most active tech talent and tech executives today come from the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), according to the 2026 Global Tech Report by KPMG. This makes having a cross-border payments system for startups in place all the more important, especially when managing foreign payments across multiple currencies.

Cross-border payment friction in the tech industry is one of many problems that require manual attention most of the time, making it a bigger hurdle to balance two recurring tasks: sustaining a company’s research and development operations, and managing multi-market revenue.

Not knowing how to handle foreign payments for your business, especially in currencies like USD, can lead to tax complications, FX losses, and operational inefficiencies. All of these problems, if left unattended, can lead to missing opportunities for growth and scaling.

It is important to incorporate a structured payment system that your team can rely on, whether it’s for receiving cross-border payments or sending them over. It is also much better to have this system incorporated into your financial operations in the early stages of your IT company’s development.

Step 1: Going from receiving payment to truly scaling your business

For startups and IT companies entering global markets, managing foreign payments for business growth starts with acquiring international clients. But scaling requires the right financial infrastructure.

If acquiring international clients is a bigger step you’d like to take and improve on, then ensuring that you have a strong financial system in place, before everything else, is important to ensure your IT company’s credibility, reliability, and success.

First, you’ll need to ensure that every payment coming from your company is immediately matched with an invoice and contract, as soon as the transaction takes place. This makes bookkeeping more manageable as you monitor your company’s outgoing finances.

Prioritize maintaining clean and organized financial records per project, per client, to gain a reliable paper trail that you can look back on whenever necessary.

Additionally, you should take platform fees, deductions, and real-time exchange differences into consideration, and note all of these extra fees per transaction, especially your cross-border transactions. This can potentially show you where small fund leaks are coming from, and you’ll be able to fix these leaks in time.

It’s best to use a centralized dashboard where you can see all of your company’s incoming and outgoing revenue, to help you save time and make monitoring finances a more efficient process. 

If you’re already in the process of acquiring international clients, it’s not too late to make improvements in your financial systems. Sherwin Alegre, Founder & CEO of MicroSource Inc., Philippines, benefits from having cross-border payment schemes made more convenient, locally available, and user-accessible to their company post-establishment. This was achieved through Payoneer and its intuitive features. For example, using a Payoneer business account in the Philippines allows startups to receive payments in USD and manage them efficiently before converting to PHP.

Step 2: Decide when to convert currency

When in the position of handling an IT company that specializes in outsourcing, receiving payments should not be framed as a company’s end goal, as this only marks the beginning of new operational decisions.

Converting and holding foreign currency (especially when managing a USD to PHP business account) comes with strategic advantages and trade-offs. Payoneer is not a standalone currency conversion service, but it does assist you in the process of converting your international funds, alongside helping you send and receive cross-border payments. 

Converting funds immediately allows you to see the lifespan of your cross-border transaction in one sitting, giving you full visibility on each converted amount. This offers a sense of predictability, and enables you to plan your finances around a specific conversion amount.

If you prefer to stay on the safer side of financial planning, converting the cross-border payments you receive immediately also reduces its exposure to ever-fluctuating FX currency rates.

A blaring downside of converting funds immediately upon receiving them is the accumulation of conversion fees, especially if you receive cross-border payments in increments from your contractors and investors. Over time, these fees can eat into your margins, and without a neat and organized tracking system for your cross-border finances, this could impact your operations in the long run.

Holding USD in a multi-currency business account allows you to delay conversion to PHP and potentially benefit from better exchange rates. Having foreign funds readily available enables you to consider hiring global talent and working with international contractors more freely. Many startups use a USD to PHP business account strategy — holding USD for international expenses while converting only what’s needed for local operations.

The potential to benefit from more favorable exchange rates is also possible if you decide to hold your cross-border payments in the meantime. Payoneer’s Withdraw to Bank feature can make it so that your international payments are withdrawn into your local bank account only when it hits a target conversion rate.

However, holding funds entirely is also not guaranteed to give big returns. If PHP strengthens at any point in time, the foreign currency that you currently hold will diminish in value. If this is your current strategy, you are also effectively only speculating on exchange rates, even if unintentionally.

Holding funds also adds to a list of mental errors you can commit over time. You could potentially overestimate how much funds you currently have, until you decide to convert your foreign funds and only see the full conversion rates by then.

There is no right or wrong way to approach holding and converting your cross-border payments, and both can be equally beneficial or negatively impactful to your IT company’s finances. A good strategy can be implemented by incorporating both holding and converting cross-border payments into your financial cycles, determined by near-term obligations in PHP, and the timing of your company’s expenses.

Having a multi-currency business account is a good way to monitor the income and outflow of your funds, especially if IT and tech outsourcing is your niche. Most IT companies consist of segmented teams, scattered across different parts of the world. This makes it all the more important to have a multi-currency account that is also simple to navigate, in an already complex working system.

Step 3: Allocate funds strategically

For startups managing cross-border payments, revenue should be strategically reinvested to support global operations and sustainable growth. Your profit may change frequently depending on all of the expenses outlined below. Nevertheless, it is important to allocate it correctly.

Operational expenses for IT companies are broken down into quite a few subgroups, most of which may need monthly maintenance or may shoot up expenses, and will need to be thoroughly prepared for.

• Hardware purchases and maintenance – Computers and its parts, physical servers, networking tools and connection devices, and company laptops and phones if applicable to your enterprise.
• Software expenses – Cloud-based infrastructures, productivity suites, subscription-based software, and licenses are part and parcel of your maintenance fees, usually billed on a monthly basis.
• IT Maintenance and Support – Your IT company will need the assistance of a backend support team. You will need to allot repayment for retainer contracts, consulting services, staff training, and upskilling seminars for your team.
• Management software – Logs and changes in your team’s work should be visible to you regardless of the work device used. Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) suites are a staple in maintenance management for your IT company.

Wages and contractor payments should also be mapped out in your financial plan, with a specific payout period. Your revenue will most likely revolve around your total wages and contractor payments, so it’s important to plan around this expense ahead of time.

As for taxes, the Republic Act (RA) 12066, also known as the Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises to Maximize Opportunities for Reinvigorating the Economy (CREATE MORE) Law in the Philippines, was signed into law in November 11, 2024. This helps IT outsourcing and BPO companies bring a significant amount of foreign exchange and employment to the Philippines, already having generated $40 billion in USD in revenue in 2025. 

Applying as a Registered Business Enterprise (RBE) or Registered Export Enterprise (REE) through agencies such as the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) or the Board of Investments (BOI) can help you benefit from these government subsidies on tax.

Depending on how your company is registered, you may choose to settle your mandatory taxes through one of the two long-term tax regimes, spanning from 10 to 17 years:

What it is	Special Corporate Income Tax (SCIT)	Enhanced Deductions Regime (EDR)
The rates	5% flat tax on Gross Income Earned (GIE)	20% Corporate Income Tax (CIT) on net income
What it’s for	Best for IT companies and BPOs that prefer simplicity, to narrow the potential for accounting errors	Best for IT companies and BPOs that incur massive local expenses due to operational costs
Caps on local government taxes	You are exempt from local and national business fees, taxes, and charges	2% of your gross income, as per the RBE Local Tax (RBELT)

Have a clean record of your company expenses and due taxes, and always double-check these numbers with your accountant to ensure compliance. After calculating your taxes, wages, and your profit, you are left with potential reinvestment funds.

Your people are your main asset, so reinvesting in them not only boosts morale but their performance as well. A few reinvestments in your staff that are worth looking into are certifications in the cloud architecture that you use, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, Cybersecurity certifications like CISSP and CEH, and even AI Machine Learning certifications for your team’s future-proofing.

Your global certifications in data privacy are also a good point of reinvestment, as foreign entities seeking to conduct business with you will, most likely look, out for these credentials first. Look into strengthening your ISO/IEC 27001 (Information Security), SOC 2 Type II, and GDPR compliance frameworks on a regular basis.

These are just some of the many expenses that an IT company can accumulate, so it is important to properly keep your revenue segmented, to maintain the stability of your cash flow.

Step 4: Maintain the stability of your cash flow

Ensuring stable cash flow is important when managing foreign payments in a business, especially with fluctuating exchange rates. FX rates will fluctuate based on different factors, and these fluctuations could potentially eat into your profit margins. 

To ensure hedging against potential downward fluctuations in currency exchange, build a buffer fund made up of at least two to three months’ worth of company expenses. This serves as your “emergency” funds for when conversion rates are lower than your projected rates and expected withdrawal amounts.

Handling tax and compliance requirements as soon as they come up, or as soon as possible, is key to managing your finances. Frequently check with your accountant on due dates and payables. If you’re doing it alone, make sure to note these dates down and develop a sense of awareness for these deadlines.

These practices, when done hand in hand, enable you to remunerate your local and global talents on time, and as efficiently as possible, while avoiding inflated fees and unexpected conversion rates.

Payoneer is a key factor in speeding up the operations of a handful of IT & outsourcing companies in the Philippines, including Task Me Quick, which specializes in providing customer support teams and services. Carlo Angelo Orbe, Founder of Task Me Quick, shared that Payoneer helps their company shorten their cross-border receiving time from two weeks to 48 hours. A large cut in conversion waiting time like this helps you better align your expenses to your revenue.

Step 5: Avoid common mistakes

There are a few mistakes you should watch out for in terms of dealing with cross-border payments and revenue. These mistakes are commonplace and easy to run into if you’re not mindful.

• Converting foreign funds without strategic planning. As outlined in an earlier point, it won’t be wrong to either hold or convert your funds, but not knowing when or why to do it will be detrimental for your business funds.
• Mixing personal funds with business funds makes it easier to think you have less money than you can spend on yourself, or more money that you can spend on your business, if your personal funds are not separate from your business funds. 
• Not taking care of tax compliance procedures ahead of time can enable complacency to seep into your finance management strategies, posing more problems ahead such as mistiming your withdrawals, underestimating the time you need to process documents, and more.
• Using different tools to convert your cross-border payments into local currency, to view your incoming and outgoing business funds, and to disburse payrolls into your team’s accounts can make the process of consolidating all your business transactions all the more confusing.

Step 6: Use tools that simplify your global financial operations

It is better to use a centralized platform for all of your cross-border transactions, instead of separately relying on different tools to stay on track.

Payoneer Business Accounts are designed for efficiency and ease of use for MSMEs, which include rising enterprises in the Philippines, especially in the IT outsourcing sector. Using a platform that simplifies your global financial operations for you is one of the keys to scaling globally.

This takes your focus off having to do detailed manual checking on each aspect of your finances, which might otherwise add to your workload.

Ideally, you should be able to review and keep full visibility of your incoming and outgoing finances within your business, which Payoneer makes easier for you. One business account allows you to hold multiple currencies, directly and positively impacting your ability to pay your suppliers, employees, and contractors on time.

Furthermore, you can withdraw your foreign funds to any local bank or e-wallet in the Philippines, and to any number of banks*.

To withdraw your funds from Payoneer, simply follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your Payoneer account, via mobile or desktop.
2. Go to Withdraw & Transfer, and tap Withdraw to Bank.
3. Select your bank from the dropdown, or add a new one** under “Add new”
4. Pick your currency: USD, EUR, GBP, and more
5. Enter your withdrawal amount. Check the minimum and maximum limits on screen before you continue.
6. Review the details, including exchange rate and fees, then tick “I approve” and hit Withdraw

Handle international payments with more ease

Having the proper systems in place can help you scale from a local business, where operations are strictly limited to and from the Philippines, to a multi-entity model that conducts business from many parts of the world.

Paying developers, IT maintenance staff, and contractors from different countries can be an easy cyclical process instead of a manually taxing one. Carlo Angelo Orbe notes that Task Me Us, as a company, is no longer anxious in terms of dealing with clients because of Payoneer’s simple but intuitive features.

Knowing where to put your focus helps your business succeed in the long term. That focus should be on your daily operations and opportunities for scaling. For businesses that are looking to scale and fortify the stability of their systems, Payoneer is an ideal platform for all your cross-border financial management needs, enabling you to see all transactions, hold and convert money, and withdraw your funds to bank as soon as you need them.**

Disclaimer: *Each bank account added to your Payoneer account is subject to approval.

**Subject to approval and review.

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