Coneo Review

International Employment Services — What It Covers and What It Doesn't

Coneo's International Employment Services covers a specific set of EOR-adjacent capabilities for companies deploying international staff into Croatia without a local entity. Confirmed scope: payroll and social security administration for employees with foreign employers; assistance with contract creation and registration for foreign-headquartered companies; salary statements and exemption processing for expatriates (Croatian social security exemptions when bilateral treaties apply); shadow payroll for proper source tax deductions; billing and debt collection management with agencies; expense reimbursement policy drafting and filing. What this service does NOT explicitly confirm (requiring direct clarification): whether Coneo signs employment contracts as the legal employer of record (EOR) or merely manages payroll for a foreign company that is already the employer; whether HZZO health insurance registration in Coneo's name vs. the foreign employer's name; and how indefinite vs. project-based employment is handled. For conventional EOR buyers (company has no Croatian entity and needs someone to be the legal employer), confirm whether Coneo serves this use case explicitly.

Shadow Payroll — The Specialist EOR-Adjacent Capability

Shadow payroll is one of the most technically sophisticated capabilities in international employment management and is explicitly confirmed as a Coneo service. It involves maintaining a notional payroll in the employee's home country while actual salary is paid in the host country (or vice versa), to ensure compliance with tax and social security obligations in both jurisdictions. This is required for: international assignees under tax equalisation policies (where the employer guarantees the employee pays no more tax than they would at home); split-payroll arrangements (where salary is split between home and host country bank accounts); social security treaty management (determining which country's social security applies under bilateral A1 certificate or SSA treaty rules); and accurate P60/W-2/Lohnsteuerbescheinigung reconciliation at year-end for multi-country employees. Pure-play EOR platforms (Deel, Remote, Gloroots) typically do not provide shadow payroll — they manage the host country payroll only. Coneo's 30-year accounting and tax advisory background makes it uniquely positioned to deliver shadow payroll for DACH-to-Croatia assignees where both Austrian/German and Croatian tax and social security obligations must be simultaneously managed.

Croatia Post-Euro Payroll — January 2023 and Fiscalization 2.0

Croatia adopted the Euro on 1 January 2023, replacing the Croatian Kuna (HRK) — a compliance transition that Coneo navigated in real time for its Croatian payroll clients. All Croatian payroll is now EUR-denominated, eliminating the HRK/EUR conversion complexity for European clients. The most recent Croatian compliance development is Fiscalization 2.0: effective 1 January 2026 (confirmed in Coneo's April 2026 blog post), Croatia's Fiscalization reform now requires eInvoice-based VAT accounting and reporting — affecting how payroll-related invoicing, expense reimbursements, and contractor payments are documented and reported. Coneo's active blog coverage confirms real-time regulatory engagement with both changes. For international companies entering Croatia after the Euro adoption, EUR-denominated payroll is standard; for those who operated pre-2023, Coneo can confirm the smooth transition without HRK legacy complexity.

DACH-to-SEE in One Firm — The ETL GLOBAL Advantage

The ETL GLOBAL network membership (Serbia + Croatia since 2021; Austria 2025) enables Coneo to serve Austrian and German companies expanding into Croatia, Serbia, or Slovenia within a single professional services network. In practice this means: a German company setting up a Croatian subsidiary can use CONEO Austria (Graz or Vienna office) for its Austrian parent company tax affairs and CONEO Croatia for Croatian subsidiary payroll, employment contracts, and international employment management — with both sides of the engagement handled by teams that share network standards, knowledge bases, and cross-referral protocols. For smaller Austrian Mittelstand companies for whom Croatia or Serbia is a secondary market (back-office operations, manufacturing, IT team), having one trusted advisor manage the full Austria + Croatia tax and employment picture eliminates the coordination overhead and communication friction of managing separate Austrian and Croatian advisors who do not know each other.