What Equipment Do I Ship To A New Overseas Hire? Nothing. Here Is Who Buys What.

None of it. A new offshore hire needs a laptop, a headset, a second screen and a chair. The laptop should arrive set up and managed, and everything else is cheaper and quicker bought where they live. Outstaffer supplies and manages the laptop, so treat this as an interested account.

The freight is the cheapest part of the decision, which is why asking what equipment do I ship to a new overseas hire gets the arithmetic backwards.

The equipment moved more in price this year than the money did

The Reserve Bank raised the cash rate to 4.60 per cent with effect from 30 September, and the Board next decides on 3 November. One line in the decision statement explains why a rate move belongs in an equipment post. The Board recorded that strong global demand for AI-related technology has pushed up prices for those goods.

The same build-out sits on both sides of your purchase order: bidding up the laptop, and inside the decision that put up the price of the money.

Apple lifted its Australian starting prices in June, the MacBook Air going from $1,799 to $2,099, reported by the Australian Computer Society’s Information Age, with Apple naming memory and storage costs driven by AI data centre demand.

Three hires next quarter is $6,297 of machines, paid before anybody bills an hour. The price rise alone accounts for $900 of it. Carrying that $6,297 for a year at the cash rate is about $290, and your overdraft is dearer than the cash rate.

The price rise alone is about three times what a year of interest on all three machines costs at the cash rate. Most founders have been watching the wrong number.

What goes in the kit for a new overseas hire?

A current laptop, a wired headset, a mouse and keyboard, a second monitor, a desk chair and, where outages are common, a power backup. That is it. Phones and printers are things people ask for, not things the work needs on day one.

Only the laptop is worth managing centrally. It holds the data, it needs to be enrolled and patched, and it has to come back. The rest is cheap in most of the region, handled by one person for years, and awkward to post. Have the hire buy it locally and claim it through expenses. We suggest an allowance of about $175 per new hire in the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, India or Malaysia, with a monitor by approval at $250 to $400.

Shipping a laptop is permitted, slow, and billed on landed value

Nothing stops you sending one yourself. Permitted is not the same as free, though. A machine posted from Sydney still needs freight, an import entry, taxes assessed on its landed value and somebody to clear it, and the only figure worth quoting is the one your forwarder gives you for that consignment. And it takes time.

A hire who starts without a machine is on salary and producing nothing. That is the cost to avoid, and it is why the laptop should be ordered the day the offer is signed, by someone who handles the freight and the customs as a matter of routine.

Does buying it there cost you control?

Only if nobody owns the asset. A laptop supplied by whoever employs the person arrives enrolled, and stays patched, lockable and wipeable for as long as they work with you. Who can wipe it comes down to who provides the laptop, which is the question underneath this one.

Buying it yourself from Australia and posting it over gives you a receipt in your name and a device on a desk you cannot reach.

The honest counter, and the morning it stops holding

The counter is good. A few hundred dollars of freight against a salary in the tens of thousands does not decide a hire, many businesses post laptops overseas without trouble, and buying accessories locally means a thinner choice of models. All true.

It holds until the first resignation. A device you posted yourself is one you have to get back across a border, and the recovery is a customs problem on the worst morning available. A managed laptop is collected and wiped as part of the service, and a mouse was never worth recovering. The same logic runs through what an hour of back office admin actually costs: the sticker price is rarely where the money goes.

Related reading

• ASD says the fix is in who holds the laptop
• Wages up, output per hour flat: what the June quarter cost

So the answer to what equipment do I ship to a new overseas hire is a policy, not a parcel. Write down who owns the laptop, who enrols it, who pays for the replacement and who gets it back, then set an allowance for everything else and let the person buy it where they are. If you would rather see that priced before you commit, run the numbers on one role against what your freight and procurement already cost.

Which would you rather defend to your accountant: a laptop you own on paper, or one you can switch off tonight?