"We had contracts and invoices. Turns out that wasn't enough." — how one Polish GameDev studio rebuilt its contractor setup after an annual review

A mid-size art and dev outsourcing studio based in Poland. 35 people in-house, 40+ contractors spread across Poland, the Czech Republic, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. The kind of setup that works, until someone asks the right question.

For two years, the finance team handled contractor payments the same way: collect the invoice, approve the amount, send the transfer. B2B contracts were signed at the start of each engagement. Invoices came in every month.

Behind the scenes, payments went out across a mix of bank transfers, occasional crypto, and manual currency conversions — each contractor paid differently depending on where they were based.

When a document was needed, someone would chase it over email. Nobody flagged it as a problem.

The studio had grown significantly over the previous two years — more contractors, larger payments, new countries. During the preparation for the annual tax filing, the accountant reviewing the studio’s cross-border payments raised a question the finance team hadn't considered before.

Did the studio have tax residency certificates on file for its foreign contractors?

The answer was no. The studio didn't have valid certificates on file for any of them.

The accountant walked them through the issue. Under Polish tax law, payments to foreign contractors for certain types of services may require withholding tax — unless the company can demonstrate the contractor's tax residency and confirm that a relevant tax treaty applies.

For a number of cross-border payments, the studio couldn't confidently confirm the absence of WHT liability or apply treaty relief — without proper qualification of the services and tax residency certificates on file.

The exposure wasn't catastrophic. But it was real — potential WHT exposure, uncertainty around treaty eligibility, and the risk of tax arrears if the treatment was later challenged.

The certificates were just the starting point. As the review went on, it became clear the payment setup that had seemed functional was actually fragmented — different rails for different contractors, paperwork scattered across email threads, no single place to see what had been signed or paid.

For a team managing 40+ contractors across 4 countries, that meant every payout cycle required manual coordination. Someone had to track who was paid through which channel, chase missing invoices, and reconcile records that lived in different places.

The studio needed to fix two things: build a payment and document process that wouldn't create the same gaps next time, and collect tax residency certificates from contractors based outside Poland.

For the first, after looking at a few options, they moved to the Stape platform — primarily because it brought payments, contracts, and invoices into one place rather than requiring separate tools for each part of the process.

The certificates had to run in parallel. The studio contacted each contractor directly, explained what was needed, and collected the documents outside the platform.

After moving to Stape, two things changed:

• For the document side: contracts and invoices moved into one centralized place instead of being scattered across emails and folders. The studio now had a single location for contractor paperwork rather than hunting across inboxes every month.

• For the payment side: all contractor payments moved into one platform. Bank transfers, crypto, EUR/USD — handled in a single flow, fixed fee per payout, with payment records the finance team could actually find when they needed them.

The tax residency certificates (collected separately, outside the platform) gave the studio what it needed to work through the tax position with its advisors properly.

The process changed going forward too. Certificates are now requested at onboarding rather than chased after the fact.

This studio wasn't unusual. Many mid-size GameDev teams paying contractors across multiple countries are running a version of the same setup — contracts signed at the start, invoices collected each month, payments sent. It works, operationally. The compliance layer is just invisible until someone looks for it.

The gap between "we have a process" and "our process would hold up" is rarely obvious from the inside. It usually surfaces during an annual review, a tax filing, or when a new advisor asks a question nobody had thought to ask before.


By that point, the question isn't whether there's a gap — it's how much it's going to cost to close it.

If any part of this setup feels familiar, book a 20-minute call with Stape. We'll look at your current contractor setup and tell you where the gaps are.