As we look forward to 2025, here’s a look back on five things customers asked for that we launched in 2024. We focused on addressing customer feedback, simplifying your workflows, and introducing tools to make managing projects, payments, and finances easier and more efficient. Each of these updates was released based on customer feedback and designed with users in mind.

Let’s dive into the highlights of what we accomplished together in 2024!

1. Integrations with campaign management tools

In 2024, we took a major step forward in streamlining your workflow by introducing Zapier Integrations. This new capability allows you to seamlessly connect Lumanu with your existing campaign management tools, such as Google Sheets, Monday.com, Notion, Airtable, Salesforce, or any other platform supported by Zapier.

Now, creating payables and managing payments is more efficient than ever, integrating smoothly into the tools you already use to manage your projects and teams.

How It Works:

The Zapier integration enables you to automate the creation of payables in Lumanu based on triggers from your favorite tools. For example:

• When a creator completes deliverables in your workflow tool (e.g., a status update in monday.com or a completed checkbox in Airtable), Lumanu automatically pulls in all relevant metadata to create a payable.

• Metadata such as payment amounts, due dates, vendor details, and project IDs are transferred directly into Lumanu, saving time and reducing errors.

Imagine this: Your team marks a campaign deliverable as complete in Monday.com. Zapier triggers Lumanu to create a payable, pulling in all the necessary metadata: creator email, payment amount, description and due date—automatically. No manual intervention, no errors, just seamless execution.

By integrating Lumanu with existing workflow tools, we’re ensuring that managing payments and deliverables is simpler, faster, and more accurate than ever.

2. Enhanced Project Management: Streamlined and Simplified

Managing payments across multiple campaigns and projects can feel overwhelming, especially when crucial information isn’t immediately accessible. That’s why we reimagined our Projects Overview page to ensure you get the insights you need in a glance.

Key Updates:

• Project level management:
  Users can now create separate projects and project level budgets to manage all payments to freelancers by project. User roles can also be defined at the project level to support granular user based permissions.

• Project Wallets:
  Introduced this year, the Project Wallet organizes your funds into three buckets:

  • Available Balance: Funds that are ready to spend immediately.

  • Spent: Total funds used to date.

  • Pending: Payments awaiting vendor setup or scheduled disbursement.

• Project Overview Page:
  We’ve surfaced the most valuable and relevant information to the forefront. You’ll no longer need to dig through layers of data to find what’s most important—your insights are now front and center.

• Project Preview Cards:
  The introduction of Available Balance visibility on each project card ensures you can instantly see what funds are available to spend.

Projects allow you to easily manage project level payments and stay on top of upcoming payments and overall budgets at every step.

3. Payment Setup and Management: More Control and Flexibility

In 2024, Lumanu introduced updates to streamline your payments process and give you more control. Improvements covered everything from onboarding new vendors to making payouts in the future.

What’s New:

• Automated vendor invitations:
  Simply schedule a payment to any email address and Lumanu now automated the outreach and vendor onboarding for you while giving you visibility into the status in your dashboard. Lumanu sends automated emails and have a dedicated creator support team to ensure your partners are setup properly and paid. 

• Scheduled payments:
  When initiating a payment, select a specific date for the funds to be disbursed. Lumanu moves those payments to pending and ensures the payment is processed automatically on that date, so you never have to worry about missing a deadline.

• Editable payments:
  Things change. You can now update payment amounts, scheduled payment dates and descriptions to payouts without having to delete and create new payments. This applies to all payments which makes it easy to update a row in a csv import versus correcting the file and re-uploading.

4. Improved Funding Management: A One-Stop Financial Hub

In 2024, we centralized all funding workflows in the Finances tab. Our goal was to create a unified, intuitive space for generating funding invoices, tracking status and managing internal transfers between projects.

What’s New:

• Streamlined Fund Transfers:
  All internal fund transfers now take place within the Finances tab, with an updated modal that simplifies source and destination selection. Real-time budget alerts ensure teams don’t overspend versus allocated budget.

• Improved Funding Invoices:
  We introduced distinct labels for itemized funding invoices (related to specific payments for any given project) and general funding invoices (pre-funding for your Lumanu workspace). This gives teams more flexibility to set up funding based on your finance team’s requirements.

• Internal Transfer Tracking:
  A new transaction type and filtering system gives you complete visibility into financial movements, making it easier to track how funds flow within your workspace.

These changes are designed to save you time and eliminate unnecessary complexity.

5. Lumanu IDs: Improving Payment Accuracy

This year, we introduced Lumanu IDs, unique account identifiers that enhance the accuracy of vendor payments.

• How Lumanu IDs Work:
  Automatically assigned after tax verification, Lumanu IDs add an extra layer of precision to your payment workflows. They work alongside email aliases to ensure payments always reach the correct account.Lumanu IDs are visible across vendor profiles and .csv uploads. If a Lumanu ID is provided, it will be prioritized for payment processing.

By simplifying vendor identification, Lumanu IDs reduce errors and ensure a seamless payment experience for both you and your vendors.

Looking Ahead to 2025

As we reflect on 2024, we’re proud of the progress we’ve made in simplifying workflows, improving financial visibility, and enhancing our users overall experience with Lumanu. Every feature we introduced this year was inspired by feedback and tailored to meet our users' needs.

In 2025, we’ll continue to listen to our users to empower partnerships between marketing teams and creators. Have any questions or suggestions? We’d love to hear from you at support@lumanu.com.

Here’s to another year of growth and success!

Warm regards,
The Lumanu Team