How to Pay Collaborators

The idea behind obligations is that it serves as a queue.

All of the payouts that you owe but have not yet processed build up here.

When you’re ready, you come into Siren and create a fulfillment to tally up all of the

pending obligations you have and turn them into a fulfillment. A fulfillment consolidates all of

these obligations into individual payout records. When creating a fulfillment, obligations are

tallied and converted into payout records, one for each collaborator. Once the payout records are

established, they can be managed in a couple of different ways, but we’ll get into that in a

moment. First, let’s create a fulfillment for all of our existing obligations. So right now,

we have these three obligations that we’ve created. There’s two different ways we can approach

creating this fulfillment. First off, we can manually check and select any obligations that

we want to pay and create a fulfillment directly from them. Here you’ll see that it will give you

the details of what that fulfillment will look like, the total amount that we’ll owe and what

obligations were effective. So you could do it that way where you select individual obligations

and create the fulfillments. Alternatively, if we go back, you can click create fulfillments from

pending right here and it will automatically take all of the pending obligations and turn them into

a single fulfillment. And the process is the same. It’ll show you the same screen as you saw just a

minute ago. The only difference is if there were more pending obligations that won’t be selected,

the amounts would be different. Whenever you’re ready, you just click generate fulfillments.

And just like that, we have a fulfillment that was created. Now back on our obligations screen,

you’ll see that we have all of our obligations are set as a status of complete. And you’ll also

notice that a payout ID has been associated with each obligation. You’ll also notice that Stephen’s

two obligations here both have the same payout ID, whereas Brad has a different ID. And that’s

because all of the obligations for each collaborator were compiled into a single payout ID tallied up

and set up inside of the fulfillment. And you can even click on this payout ID right here and it’ll

actually filter the obligations based on which payout ID that’s associated with. So this allows

you to see which obligations were handled by which payouts. Okay, so now if we go over to

fulfillments, we’re going to see that we have a single fulfillment and a fulfillment has many

payouts. So if we click on this fulfillment right here, you’ll see there they are. There’s payout ID

one and two, one for Stephen and one for Brad. The totals of $16.35 for Stephen and $1.80 for Brad.

And if we go back to obligations, you’ll see $1.80 and then this must add up to whatever the

fulfillments are for the other one. Now that we have taken all of the obligations and we have

merged them into the fulfillment, now we can go about handling paying these individual collaborators

for the money that we owe them. And we also have a ledger and a backlog with all of the information

on how every single obligation was paid, when it was paid and where it was paid. So all of that

documentation can be useful for auditing purposes or your own statistics or anything like that.

There are a couple different ways that you can handle paying a fulfillment. The first one is

to just manually go through and pay them. So you can select one and click mark as paid and click

apply. And once you do that, it will mark it as paid. So, you know, as long as you actually paid

it, it’ll be marked as paid. You can also go back and mark it as unpaid at any time. Alternatively,

you can click fulfill payouts. And what this will do is it will let you export a CSV file of all of

the payouts in this fulfillment and it will automatically mark all of them as paid. So when

you click download CSV, it’s going to download the CSV file that you can then use to import into

your payment processor or whatever it is. Now, if we go back and we take a look at fulfillments

and we click on the fulfillment ID, you’re going to see that all of the fulfillments were

automatically marked as paid. Now, again, if after doing this, you run into some kind of problem

with any of these and you want to mark it as unpaid now, you can do that at any time.

You can come back and mark this as unpaid. So maybe Stephen comes back to you and says,

you know, I never received my payment or maybe something went wrong when you were trying to pay

him after you exported it. No big deal. Just come back in here. Mark it as unpaid. Now you have a

way to be able to keep track of who is and who isn’t paid. Okay, so that is a complete flow of

start to finish from initial engagement with a customer all the way through obligations,

conversions, and fulfillment.