The honest case for hiring SAP Business One talent abroad
Every few weeks an employer asks us whether they should look overseas for SAP Business One people. Our answer is usually "it depends what the role actually does" — which sounds like a dodge until you look at where international B1 hires succeed and where they quietly fail.
They succeed on development and support. SDK work, Crystal Reports, integrations, second-line support: these travel well. The work is specified, the output is testable, and the time-zone offset can even help — a support desk that follows the sun is a genuine service upgrade. B1 has deep talent pools in markets where the platform has strong penetration, and a UK or US employer can access skills there that are scarce and expensive at home.
They struggle on customer-facing implementation. A functional consultant lives in workshops: reading a room of sceptical warehouse staff, hearing what a finance director means rather than what they say. Distance makes all of that harder, and in our experience it's the single biggest reason overseas implementation hires don't stick. If the role is mostly discovery and go-live, hire close to the customer.
The money, without the wishful thinking
Yes, salary arbitrage is real — and smaller than the spreadsheet suggests. By the time you've added the coordination overhead, the occasional on-site visit, and an employer-of-record or contractor arrangement done properly, a "half-price" hire typically lands at 65–80% of domestic cost. Worth having, but not the number in the pitch deck.
For calibration: a mid-level B1 functional consultant runs £49,500–£66,000 in the UK and $93,500–$126,500 in the US — the whole structure is in our salary guide. Remote-friendly hiring is also far more normal in the US market than the UK one, which changes what "abroad" even means depending on which side of the Atlantic you're hiring for.
If you're going to do it
Keep it short: pay properly for the level, don't nickel-and-dime the exchange rate; put real overlap hours in the contract, not "flexible"; fly them in for go-lives; and check legal status early — visa sponsorship, IR35 in the UK, worker classification in the US. Every failed international hire we've seen post-mortemed came down to skipping one of those four.
The pattern we see across our SAP Business One desk: the best use of international hiring is extending a strong local team, not replacing one.
Weighing this up for a real vacancy? Brief us on it and we'll tell you honestly whether the role travels — and if you're a B1 professional open to cross-border work, upload your CV and we'll show you who's hiring that way.