Thought overtime across borders would be simple. It really wasn't.

So we had an employee travel for work across Serbia, North Macedonia, and back to Albania over about 8 weeks. Straightforward trip, or so it seemed.

Along the way they worked 2 weekends and 2 national holidays. And the client had already paid per diem directly to the employee during the trip.

What I thought would be a quick payroll adjustment turned into a genuinely stressful afternoon. Turns out each country calculates overtime and holiday premiums differently, Albania has specific per diem rules (12–36 USD/day depending on distance), and because the client had already paid per diem directly, we had a potential co-employment issue to untangle on top of everything else. Oh, and it all needed to go into May payroll within 24 hours.

I'm not going to pretend I had a clean system for it, honestly we figured it out, but it was more scramble than process.

What I'm curious about: for those of you managing people who travel internationally for work, do you have actual policies in place for this stuff, overtime, per diem, holiday pay across jurisdictions? Or does everyone just handle it case by case and hope for the best?