By
Lumanu
Aug 16, 2024
Using BILL for Influencer, Affiliate, and UGC Creator Payments
Managing payments to influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators can be a complex task, especially when you're working with a large number of partners. BILL, a popular financial operations platform, can help streamline the process, but it also comes with its own set of challenges. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the process and workflow of using BILL for these payments, highlighting both its strengths and the potential challenges when using BILL to manage onboarding and payments for creator marketing. In this blog post I am going to be referring to “influencers” which can be interchangeable with all creators marketing works with as 1099 freelancers.
1. Creating Vendor records in BILL
Setting up BILL for influencer payments starts with creating a vendor record for each influencer. This involves several key steps:
Create a Vendor Record: Your finance team needs to create a vendor record for each influencer. This includes entering their basic information, such as name, email address, and contact details. Additionally, if the influencer provides a PNID (Personal Network ID), it should be entered at this stage.
Invite the Influencer: After the vendor record is created, your finance team will send an invitation to the influencer to set up their BILL account. This invitation is sent via email.
Gather Tax Information: Before processing any payments, you'll need to gather the influencer’s tax information, such as their TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number). This information must be manually added to the vendor record in BILL.
Obtain a Signed 1099: To ensure compliance with tax regulations, it’s crucial to have a signed 1099 form on file, especially in case there are any discrepancies in the TIN provided by the influencer during the BILL setup process. BILL does not validate the TIN provided which needs to happen to ensure tax compliance. BILL does have an option for the influencer to create a 1099 in their account but they must do so after creating their account.
2. Influencer Onboarding
The onboarding process for influencers in BILL is straightforward but requires careful coordination to ensure that influencers complete the process:
Sign-Up Process: Once the influencer receives the invitation, they will need to follow the link to create their BILL account. This involves verifying their email address and setting up a secure password.
Profile Setup: After signing up, influencers must enter additional details, including their preferred payment method (such as ACH, PayPal, etc.), their tax identification number, and other necessary information to complete their profile. One confusing part is the onboarding flow for those individuals selecting "independent contractor or sole prop" feels like the onboarding process for a business.
3. Invoice Submission
After onboarding, influencers can submit an invoices for their services:
Creating and Submitting a Bill: Influencers can create invoices directly within the BILL platform or upload pre-prepared invoices. Each invoice should detail the services provided, the amount due, and any applicable taxes.
Invoice Review: Your finance team will review submitted invoices to ensure accuracy before approving them for payment. If your company opts to set up bills or payments without requiring invoices, you’ll need to determine the appropriate workflow to handle this within BILL.
Push Payments: BILL also supports sending direct payments to vendors after they are connected to your BILL account. Many teams have found that they need to support both invoicing and push payments which adds a layer of complexity to ensure double payments are not made. If you are going to payout via push payments it's important to make that very clear as the first screen after sign up for an influencer prompts them to invoice whoever invited the influencer.
4. Payment Processing
Once an invoice is approved, the payment process can begin:
Managing Approvers: BILL requires assigning approvers at the vendor level in BILL. Keep in mind that this may change over time, and having a flexible process in place is crucial.
Payment Approval: After the invoice is approved by the designated approver for a vendor, your finance team will schedule the payment. BILL offers various payment methods, including ACH transfers, checks, and international payments, depending on your company’s preferences.
Payment Timing: After submitting for processing, BILL takes 2-4 days to process the payment which is important to keep in mind to ensure committed payment dates are met. When setting up their account, vendors have the option to receive payments with a 1 day processing time for a fee of 1%. When pushing payments, payors have the option of sending same day ACH for a fee of $10 per payment.
5. Ongoing Management
BILL’s platform includes features to help with ongoing payment management:
Payment History: Both the influencer and your finance team can access a detailed record of all invoices and payments made through BILL. However, typically, the business team does not have access to this information unless specifically granted, which can limit visibility for those managing influencer relationships.
Updating Vendor Information: If an influencer needs to update their payment details or other information, they can do so directly within their BILL account. Keeping this information up-to-date is essential to avoid any payment delays
Note: Your influencers may find it difficult to find relevant information in Bill such as payment history or where to update their information:
6. Tax Compliance
BILL can assist with tax compliance, but there are several steps to be aware of:
W-9 Form: Influencers must submit a W-9 form to comply with tax reporting requirements. This can be requested and submitted through BILL, but ensuring that all tax information is accurately provided is critical.
1099 Reporting: At the end of the year, you’ll need to generate 1099 forms for the IRS and the influencers, depending on how much they were paid throughout the year.
Challenges When Using BILL for Influencer Payments
While BILL offers many strengths, it’s not without its challenges, especially when managing payments for influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators:
Complex Onboarding Process: Establishing a streamlined process for onboarding and paying new influencers is crucial. BILL requires manual tracking to ensure all necessary information is gathered and that the influencer is fully set up before payments can be made.
Invoice Tracking: One of the most significant pain points is tracking when influencers are ready to be paid. The finance team often needs to manually verify if all information is correct and if the influencer has completed their setup, which can delay payments.
Limited Visibility for Marketing Teams: Typically, the influencer team doesn’t have access to the invoice status in BILL unless granted by the finance team. This lack of visibility can create communication challenges and delays.
Rigid Approver Assignment Framework: In BILL, once someone is set up as an approver for an account, all future approvals for that influencer must go through that approver. This setup is inflexible, especially when dealing with agencies that may require different approvers for various influencers. BILL does not support different approvers based on project or campaign.
Communication Hurdles: Ensuring clear communication between your finance team, influencer team, and the influencers themselves is critical to avoid any misunderstandings or delays in the payment process.
How Lumanu Helps with Influencer Payments:
Seamless Integration with existing ERP or Vendor Management systems (e.g.) Coupa: Lumanu acts as a single vendor for all influencer payments within a company's existing financial software. This simplifies the payment process, for example instead of creating a PO for EVERY vendor and payment, POs can be created at the campaign level or monthly/ quarterly. Lumanu can sit as a single vendor within BILL for companies who's Finance team use BILL for all other vendors.
Following this process on a periodic basis saves significant time and reduces manual errors, ensuring timely and accurate payments.
Comprehensive Vendor Onboarding and Support: Lumanu handles all aspects of vendor onboarding and support, making it easy for both the business and influencers. This reduces the administrative burden on your team, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than operational tasks.
Granular role based permissions: Lumanu supports budgeting and scheduling payments by project or campaign. Each project or campaign can have a different set of users who are responsible for creating, approving and making payouts.
Master Vendor who Manages Compliance: BILL is a money transmitter which helps you pay others. Lumanu acts as your single vendor for influencer payments, verifying submitted tax documentation is correct and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations, which means less work for your finance team.
Dedicated Payment Network: As a payment network, Lumanu provides a more specialized and streamlined solution for managing influencer payments. Similar to consumer apps like Venmo or PayPal, creators and talent managers only need to onboard to Lumanu once. Lumanu’s focus on influencers means that the platform is built to meet the unique needs of influencers and talent management.
Using BILL for influencer, affiliate, and UGC creator payments can streamline your financial operations but requires careful setup and management to avoid potential pitfalls. It may work well for smaller teams who can deal with the workflow of paying a few creators, but support costs and complexity increases with more creators and more team members. By understanding both the strengths and challenges of the platform, you can develop a process that ensures timely and accurate payments while maintaining compliance with tax regulations.
Managing payments to influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators can be a complex task, especially when you're working with a large number of partners. BILL, a popular financial operations platform, can help streamline the process, but it also comes with its own set of challenges. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the process and workflow of using BILL for these payments, highlighting both its strengths and the potential challenges when using BILL to manage onboarding and payments for creator marketing. In this blog post I am going to be referring to “influencers” which can be interchangeable with all creators marketing works with as 1099 freelancers.
1. Creating Vendor records in BILL
Setting up BILL for influencer payments starts with creating a vendor record for each influencer. This involves several key steps:
Create a Vendor Record: Your finance team needs to create a vendor record for each influencer. This includes entering their basic information, such as name, email address, and contact details. Additionally, if the influencer provides a PNID (Personal Network ID), it should be entered at this stage.
Invite the Influencer: After the vendor record is created, your finance team will send an invitation to the influencer to set up their BILL account. This invitation is sent via email.
Gather Tax Information: Before processing any payments, you'll need to gather the influencer’s tax information, such as their TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number). This information must be manually added to the vendor record in BILL.
Obtain a Signed 1099: To ensure compliance with tax regulations, it’s crucial to have a signed 1099 form on file, especially in case there are any discrepancies in the TIN provided by the influencer during the BILL setup process. BILL does not validate the TIN provided which needs to happen to ensure tax compliance. BILL does have an option for the influencer to create a 1099 in their account but they must do so after creating their account.
2. Influencer Onboarding
The onboarding process for influencers in BILL is straightforward but requires careful coordination to ensure that influencers complete the process:
Sign-Up Process: Once the influencer receives the invitation, they will need to follow the link to create their BILL account. This involves verifying their email address and setting up a secure password.
Profile Setup: After signing up, influencers must enter additional details, including their preferred payment method (such as ACH, PayPal, etc.), their tax identification number, and other necessary information to complete their profile. One confusing part is the onboarding flow for those individuals selecting "independent contractor or sole prop" feels like the onboarding process for a business.
3. Invoice Submission
After onboarding, influencers can submit an invoices for their services:
Creating and Submitting a Bill: Influencers can create invoices directly within the BILL platform or upload pre-prepared invoices. Each invoice should detail the services provided, the amount due, and any applicable taxes.
Invoice Review: Your finance team will review submitted invoices to ensure accuracy before approving them for payment. If your company opts to set up bills or payments without requiring invoices, you’ll need to determine the appropriate workflow to handle this within BILL.
Push Payments: BILL also supports sending direct payments to vendors after they are connected to your BILL account. Many teams have found that they need to support both invoicing and push payments which adds a layer of complexity to ensure double payments are not made. If you are going to payout via push payments it's important to make that very clear as the first screen after sign up for an influencer prompts them to invoice whoever invited the influencer.
4. Payment Processing
Once an invoice is approved, the payment process can begin:
Managing Approvers: BILL requires assigning approvers at the vendor level in BILL. Keep in mind that this may change over time, and having a flexible process in place is crucial.
Payment Approval: After the invoice is approved by the designated approver for a vendor, your finance team will schedule the payment. BILL offers various payment methods, including ACH transfers, checks, and international payments, depending on your company’s preferences.
Payment Timing: After submitting for processing, BILL takes 2-4 days to process the payment which is important to keep in mind to ensure committed payment dates are met. When setting up their account, vendors have the option to receive payments with a 1 day processing time for a fee of 1%. When pushing payments, payors have the option of sending same day ACH for a fee of $10 per payment.
5. Ongoing Management
BILL’s platform includes features to help with ongoing payment management:
Payment History: Both the influencer and your finance team can access a detailed record of all invoices and payments made through BILL. However, typically, the business team does not have access to this information unless specifically granted, which can limit visibility for those managing influencer relationships.
Updating Vendor Information: If an influencer needs to update their payment details or other information, they can do so directly within their BILL account. Keeping this information up-to-date is essential to avoid any payment delays
Note: Your influencers may find it difficult to find relevant information in Bill such as payment history or where to update their information:
6. Tax Compliance
BILL can assist with tax compliance, but there are several steps to be aware of:
W-9 Form: Influencers must submit a W-9 form to comply with tax reporting requirements. This can be requested and submitted through BILL, but ensuring that all tax information is accurately provided is critical.
1099 Reporting: At the end of the year, you’ll need to generate 1099 forms for the IRS and the influencers, depending on how much they were paid throughout the year.
Challenges When Using BILL for Influencer Payments
While BILL offers many strengths, it’s not without its challenges, especially when managing payments for influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators:
Complex Onboarding Process: Establishing a streamlined process for onboarding and paying new influencers is crucial. BILL requires manual tracking to ensure all necessary information is gathered and that the influencer is fully set up before payments can be made.
Invoice Tracking: One of the most significant pain points is tracking when influencers are ready to be paid. The finance team often needs to manually verify if all information is correct and if the influencer has completed their setup, which can delay payments.
Limited Visibility for Marketing Teams: Typically, the influencer team doesn’t have access to the invoice status in BILL unless granted by the finance team. This lack of visibility can create communication challenges and delays.
Rigid Approver Assignment Framework: In BILL, once someone is set up as an approver for an account, all future approvals for that influencer must go through that approver. This setup is inflexible, especially when dealing with agencies that may require different approvers for various influencers. BILL does not support different approvers based on project or campaign.
Communication Hurdles: Ensuring clear communication between your finance team, influencer team, and the influencers themselves is critical to avoid any misunderstandings or delays in the payment process.
How Lumanu Helps with Influencer Payments:
Seamless Integration with existing ERP or Vendor Management systems (e.g.) Coupa: Lumanu acts as a single vendor for all influencer payments within a company's existing financial software. This simplifies the payment process, for example instead of creating a PO for EVERY vendor and payment, POs can be created at the campaign level or monthly/ quarterly. Lumanu can sit as a single vendor within BILL for companies who's Finance team use BILL for all other vendors.
Following this process on a periodic basis saves significant time and reduces manual errors, ensuring timely and accurate payments.
Comprehensive Vendor Onboarding and Support: Lumanu handles all aspects of vendor onboarding and support, making it easy for both the business and influencers. This reduces the administrative burden on your team, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than operational tasks.
Granular role based permissions: Lumanu supports budgeting and scheduling payments by project or campaign. Each project or campaign can have a different set of users who are responsible for creating, approving and making payouts.
Master Vendor who Manages Compliance: BILL is a money transmitter which helps you pay others. Lumanu acts as your single vendor for influencer payments, verifying submitted tax documentation is correct and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations, which means less work for your finance team.
Dedicated Payment Network: As a payment network, Lumanu provides a more specialized and streamlined solution for managing influencer payments. Similar to consumer apps like Venmo or PayPal, creators and talent managers only need to onboard to Lumanu once. Lumanu’s focus on influencers means that the platform is built to meet the unique needs of influencers and talent management.
Using BILL for influencer, affiliate, and UGC creator payments can streamline your financial operations but requires careful setup and management to avoid potential pitfalls. It may work well for smaller teams who can deal with the workflow of paying a few creators, but support costs and complexity increases with more creators and more team members. By understanding both the strengths and challenges of the platform, you can develop a process that ensures timely and accurate payments while maintaining compliance with tax regulations.
Managing payments to influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators can be a complex task, especially when you're working with a large number of partners. BILL, a popular financial operations platform, can help streamline the process, but it also comes with its own set of challenges. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the process and workflow of using BILL for these payments, highlighting both its strengths and the potential challenges when using BILL to manage onboarding and payments for creator marketing. In this blog post I am going to be referring to “influencers” which can be interchangeable with all creators marketing works with as 1099 freelancers.
1. Creating Vendor records in BILL
Setting up BILL for influencer payments starts with creating a vendor record for each influencer. This involves several key steps:
Create a Vendor Record: Your finance team needs to create a vendor record for each influencer. This includes entering their basic information, such as name, email address, and contact details. Additionally, if the influencer provides a PNID (Personal Network ID), it should be entered at this stage.
Invite the Influencer: After the vendor record is created, your finance team will send an invitation to the influencer to set up their BILL account. This invitation is sent via email.
Gather Tax Information: Before processing any payments, you'll need to gather the influencer’s tax information, such as their TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number). This information must be manually added to the vendor record in BILL.
Obtain a Signed 1099: To ensure compliance with tax regulations, it’s crucial to have a signed 1099 form on file, especially in case there are any discrepancies in the TIN provided by the influencer during the BILL setup process. BILL does not validate the TIN provided which needs to happen to ensure tax compliance. BILL does have an option for the influencer to create a 1099 in their account but they must do so after creating their account.
2. Influencer Onboarding
The onboarding process for influencers in BILL is straightforward but requires careful coordination to ensure that influencers complete the process:
Sign-Up Process: Once the influencer receives the invitation, they will need to follow the link to create their BILL account. This involves verifying their email address and setting up a secure password.
Profile Setup: After signing up, influencers must enter additional details, including their preferred payment method (such as ACH, PayPal, etc.), their tax identification number, and other necessary information to complete their profile. One confusing part is the onboarding flow for those individuals selecting "independent contractor or sole prop" feels like the onboarding process for a business.
3. Invoice Submission
After onboarding, influencers can submit an invoices for their services:
Creating and Submitting a Bill: Influencers can create invoices directly within the BILL platform or upload pre-prepared invoices. Each invoice should detail the services provided, the amount due, and any applicable taxes.
Invoice Review: Your finance team will review submitted invoices to ensure accuracy before approving them for payment. If your company opts to set up bills or payments without requiring invoices, you’ll need to determine the appropriate workflow to handle this within BILL.
Push Payments: BILL also supports sending direct payments to vendors after they are connected to your BILL account. Many teams have found that they need to support both invoicing and push payments which adds a layer of complexity to ensure double payments are not made. If you are going to payout via push payments it's important to make that very clear as the first screen after sign up for an influencer prompts them to invoice whoever invited the influencer.
4. Payment Processing
Once an invoice is approved, the payment process can begin:
Managing Approvers: BILL requires assigning approvers at the vendor level in BILL. Keep in mind that this may change over time, and having a flexible process in place is crucial.
Payment Approval: After the invoice is approved by the designated approver for a vendor, your finance team will schedule the payment. BILL offers various payment methods, including ACH transfers, checks, and international payments, depending on your company’s preferences.
Payment Timing: After submitting for processing, BILL takes 2-4 days to process the payment which is important to keep in mind to ensure committed payment dates are met. When setting up their account, vendors have the option to receive payments with a 1 day processing time for a fee of 1%. When pushing payments, payors have the option of sending same day ACH for a fee of $10 per payment.
5. Ongoing Management
BILL’s platform includes features to help with ongoing payment management:
Payment History: Both the influencer and your finance team can access a detailed record of all invoices and payments made through BILL. However, typically, the business team does not have access to this information unless specifically granted, which can limit visibility for those managing influencer relationships.
Updating Vendor Information: If an influencer needs to update their payment details or other information, they can do so directly within their BILL account. Keeping this information up-to-date is essential to avoid any payment delays
Note: Your influencers may find it difficult to find relevant information in Bill such as payment history or where to update their information:
6. Tax Compliance
BILL can assist with tax compliance, but there are several steps to be aware of:
W-9 Form: Influencers must submit a W-9 form to comply with tax reporting requirements. This can be requested and submitted through BILL, but ensuring that all tax information is accurately provided is critical.
1099 Reporting: At the end of the year, you’ll need to generate 1099 forms for the IRS and the influencers, depending on how much they were paid throughout the year.
Challenges When Using BILL for Influencer Payments
While BILL offers many strengths, it’s not without its challenges, especially when managing payments for influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators:
Complex Onboarding Process: Establishing a streamlined process for onboarding and paying new influencers is crucial. BILL requires manual tracking to ensure all necessary information is gathered and that the influencer is fully set up before payments can be made.
Invoice Tracking: One of the most significant pain points is tracking when influencers are ready to be paid. The finance team often needs to manually verify if all information is correct and if the influencer has completed their setup, which can delay payments.
Limited Visibility for Marketing Teams: Typically, the influencer team doesn’t have access to the invoice status in BILL unless granted by the finance team. This lack of visibility can create communication challenges and delays.
Rigid Approver Assignment Framework: In BILL, once someone is set up as an approver for an account, all future approvals for that influencer must go through that approver. This setup is inflexible, especially when dealing with agencies that may require different approvers for various influencers. BILL does not support different approvers based on project or campaign.
Communication Hurdles: Ensuring clear communication between your finance team, influencer team, and the influencers themselves is critical to avoid any misunderstandings or delays in the payment process.
How Lumanu Helps with Influencer Payments:
Seamless Integration with existing ERP or Vendor Management systems (e.g.) Coupa: Lumanu acts as a single vendor for all influencer payments within a company's existing financial software. This simplifies the payment process, for example instead of creating a PO for EVERY vendor and payment, POs can be created at the campaign level or monthly/ quarterly. Lumanu can sit as a single vendor within BILL for companies who's Finance team use BILL for all other vendors.
Following this process on a periodic basis saves significant time and reduces manual errors, ensuring timely and accurate payments.
Comprehensive Vendor Onboarding and Support: Lumanu handles all aspects of vendor onboarding and support, making it easy for both the business and influencers. This reduces the administrative burden on your team, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than operational tasks.
Granular role based permissions: Lumanu supports budgeting and scheduling payments by project or campaign. Each project or campaign can have a different set of users who are responsible for creating, approving and making payouts.
Master Vendor who Manages Compliance: BILL is a money transmitter which helps you pay others. Lumanu acts as your single vendor for influencer payments, verifying submitted tax documentation is correct and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations, which means less work for your finance team.
Dedicated Payment Network: As a payment network, Lumanu provides a more specialized and streamlined solution for managing influencer payments. Similar to consumer apps like Venmo or PayPal, creators and talent managers only need to onboard to Lumanu once. Lumanu’s focus on influencers means that the platform is built to meet the unique needs of influencers and talent management.
Using BILL for influencer, affiliate, and UGC creator payments can streamline your financial operations but requires careful setup and management to avoid potential pitfalls. It may work well for smaller teams who can deal with the workflow of paying a few creators, but support costs and complexity increases with more creators and more team members. By understanding both the strengths and challenges of the platform, you can develop a process that ensures timely and accurate payments while maintaining compliance with tax regulations.
Managing payments to influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators can be a complex task, especially when you're working with a large number of partners. BILL, a popular financial operations platform, can help streamline the process, but it also comes with its own set of challenges. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the process and workflow of using BILL for these payments, highlighting both its strengths and the potential challenges when using BILL to manage onboarding and payments for creator marketing. In this blog post I am going to be referring to “influencers” which can be interchangeable with all creators marketing works with as 1099 freelancers.
1. Creating Vendor records in BILL
Setting up BILL for influencer payments starts with creating a vendor record for each influencer. This involves several key steps:
Create a Vendor Record: Your finance team needs to create a vendor record for each influencer. This includes entering their basic information, such as name, email address, and contact details. Additionally, if the influencer provides a PNID (Personal Network ID), it should be entered at this stage.
Invite the Influencer: After the vendor record is created, your finance team will send an invitation to the influencer to set up their BILL account. This invitation is sent via email.
Gather Tax Information: Before processing any payments, you'll need to gather the influencer’s tax information, such as their TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number). This information must be manually added to the vendor record in BILL.
Obtain a Signed 1099: To ensure compliance with tax regulations, it’s crucial to have a signed 1099 form on file, especially in case there are any discrepancies in the TIN provided by the influencer during the BILL setup process. BILL does not validate the TIN provided which needs to happen to ensure tax compliance. BILL does have an option for the influencer to create a 1099 in their account but they must do so after creating their account.
2. Influencer Onboarding
The onboarding process for influencers in BILL is straightforward but requires careful coordination to ensure that influencers complete the process:
Sign-Up Process: Once the influencer receives the invitation, they will need to follow the link to create their BILL account. This involves verifying their email address and setting up a secure password.
Profile Setup: After signing up, influencers must enter additional details, including their preferred payment method (such as ACH, PayPal, etc.), their tax identification number, and other necessary information to complete their profile. One confusing part is the onboarding flow for those individuals selecting "independent contractor or sole prop" feels like the onboarding process for a business.
3. Invoice Submission
After onboarding, influencers can submit an invoices for their services:
Creating and Submitting a Bill: Influencers can create invoices directly within the BILL platform or upload pre-prepared invoices. Each invoice should detail the services provided, the amount due, and any applicable taxes.
Invoice Review: Your finance team will review submitted invoices to ensure accuracy before approving them for payment. If your company opts to set up bills or payments without requiring invoices, you’ll need to determine the appropriate workflow to handle this within BILL.
Push Payments: BILL also supports sending direct payments to vendors after they are connected to your BILL account. Many teams have found that they need to support both invoicing and push payments which adds a layer of complexity to ensure double payments are not made. If you are going to payout via push payments it's important to make that very clear as the first screen after sign up for an influencer prompts them to invoice whoever invited the influencer.
4. Payment Processing
Once an invoice is approved, the payment process can begin:
Managing Approvers: BILL requires assigning approvers at the vendor level in BILL. Keep in mind that this may change over time, and having a flexible process in place is crucial.
Payment Approval: After the invoice is approved by the designated approver for a vendor, your finance team will schedule the payment. BILL offers various payment methods, including ACH transfers, checks, and international payments, depending on your company’s preferences.
Payment Timing: After submitting for processing, BILL takes 2-4 days to process the payment which is important to keep in mind to ensure committed payment dates are met. When setting up their account, vendors have the option to receive payments with a 1 day processing time for a fee of 1%. When pushing payments, payors have the option of sending same day ACH for a fee of $10 per payment.
5. Ongoing Management
BILL’s platform includes features to help with ongoing payment management:
Payment History: Both the influencer and your finance team can access a detailed record of all invoices and payments made through BILL. However, typically, the business team does not have access to this information unless specifically granted, which can limit visibility for those managing influencer relationships.
Updating Vendor Information: If an influencer needs to update their payment details or other information, they can do so directly within their BILL account. Keeping this information up-to-date is essential to avoid any payment delays
Note: Your influencers may find it difficult to find relevant information in Bill such as payment history or where to update their information:
6. Tax Compliance
BILL can assist with tax compliance, but there are several steps to be aware of:
W-9 Form: Influencers must submit a W-9 form to comply with tax reporting requirements. This can be requested and submitted through BILL, but ensuring that all tax information is accurately provided is critical.
1099 Reporting: At the end of the year, you’ll need to generate 1099 forms for the IRS and the influencers, depending on how much they were paid throughout the year.
Challenges When Using BILL for Influencer Payments
While BILL offers many strengths, it’s not without its challenges, especially when managing payments for influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators:
Complex Onboarding Process: Establishing a streamlined process for onboarding and paying new influencers is crucial. BILL requires manual tracking to ensure all necessary information is gathered and that the influencer is fully set up before payments can be made.
Invoice Tracking: One of the most significant pain points is tracking when influencers are ready to be paid. The finance team often needs to manually verify if all information is correct and if the influencer has completed their setup, which can delay payments.
Limited Visibility for Marketing Teams: Typically, the influencer team doesn’t have access to the invoice status in BILL unless granted by the finance team. This lack of visibility can create communication challenges and delays.
Rigid Approver Assignment Framework: In BILL, once someone is set up as an approver for an account, all future approvals for that influencer must go through that approver. This setup is inflexible, especially when dealing with agencies that may require different approvers for various influencers. BILL does not support different approvers based on project or campaign.
Communication Hurdles: Ensuring clear communication between your finance team, influencer team, and the influencers themselves is critical to avoid any misunderstandings or delays in the payment process.
How Lumanu Helps with Influencer Payments:
Seamless Integration with existing ERP or Vendor Management systems (e.g.) Coupa: Lumanu acts as a single vendor for all influencer payments within a company's existing financial software. This simplifies the payment process, for example instead of creating a PO for EVERY vendor and payment, POs can be created at the campaign level or monthly/ quarterly. Lumanu can sit as a single vendor within BILL for companies who's Finance team use BILL for all other vendors.
Following this process on a periodic basis saves significant time and reduces manual errors, ensuring timely and accurate payments.
Comprehensive Vendor Onboarding and Support: Lumanu handles all aspects of vendor onboarding and support, making it easy for both the business and influencers. This reduces the administrative burden on your team, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than operational tasks.
Granular role based permissions: Lumanu supports budgeting and scheduling payments by project or campaign. Each project or campaign can have a different set of users who are responsible for creating, approving and making payouts.
Master Vendor who Manages Compliance: BILL is a money transmitter which helps you pay others. Lumanu acts as your single vendor for influencer payments, verifying submitted tax documentation is correct and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations, which means less work for your finance team.
Dedicated Payment Network: As a payment network, Lumanu provides a more specialized and streamlined solution for managing influencer payments. Similar to consumer apps like Venmo or PayPal, creators and talent managers only need to onboard to Lumanu once. Lumanu’s focus on influencers means that the platform is built to meet the unique needs of influencers and talent management.
Using BILL for influencer, affiliate, and UGC creator payments can streamline your financial operations but requires careful setup and management to avoid potential pitfalls. It may work well for smaller teams who can deal with the workflow of paying a few creators, but support costs and complexity increases with more creators and more team members. By understanding both the strengths and challenges of the platform, you can develop a process that ensures timely and accurate payments while maintaining compliance with tax regulations.
Managing payments to influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators can be a complex task, especially when you're working with a large number of partners. BILL, a popular financial operations platform, can help streamline the process, but it also comes with its own set of challenges. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the process and workflow of using BILL for these payments, highlighting both its strengths and the potential challenges when using BILL to manage onboarding and payments for creator marketing. In this blog post I am going to be referring to “influencers” which can be interchangeable with all creators marketing works with as 1099 freelancers.
1. Creating Vendor records in BILL
Setting up BILL for influencer payments starts with creating a vendor record for each influencer. This involves several key steps:
Create a Vendor Record: Your finance team needs to create a vendor record for each influencer. This includes entering their basic information, such as name, email address, and contact details. Additionally, if the influencer provides a PNID (Personal Network ID), it should be entered at this stage.
Invite the Influencer: After the vendor record is created, your finance team will send an invitation to the influencer to set up their BILL account. This invitation is sent via email.
Gather Tax Information: Before processing any payments, you'll need to gather the influencer’s tax information, such as their TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number). This information must be manually added to the vendor record in BILL.
Obtain a Signed 1099: To ensure compliance with tax regulations, it’s crucial to have a signed 1099 form on file, especially in case there are any discrepancies in the TIN provided by the influencer during the BILL setup process. BILL does not validate the TIN provided which needs to happen to ensure tax compliance. BILL does have an option for the influencer to create a 1099 in their account but they must do so after creating their account.
2. Influencer Onboarding
The onboarding process for influencers in BILL is straightforward but requires careful coordination to ensure that influencers complete the process:
Sign-Up Process: Once the influencer receives the invitation, they will need to follow the link to create their BILL account. This involves verifying their email address and setting up a secure password.
Profile Setup: After signing up, influencers must enter additional details, including their preferred payment method (such as ACH, PayPal, etc.), their tax identification number, and other necessary information to complete their profile. One confusing part is the onboarding flow for those individuals selecting "independent contractor or sole prop" feels like the onboarding process for a business.
3. Invoice Submission
After onboarding, influencers can submit an invoices for their services:
Creating and Submitting a Bill: Influencers can create invoices directly within the BILL platform or upload pre-prepared invoices. Each invoice should detail the services provided, the amount due, and any applicable taxes.
Invoice Review: Your finance team will review submitted invoices to ensure accuracy before approving them for payment. If your company opts to set up bills or payments without requiring invoices, you’ll need to determine the appropriate workflow to handle this within BILL.
Push Payments: BILL also supports sending direct payments to vendors after they are connected to your BILL account. Many teams have found that they need to support both invoicing and push payments which adds a layer of complexity to ensure double payments are not made. If you are going to payout via push payments it's important to make that very clear as the first screen after sign up for an influencer prompts them to invoice whoever invited the influencer.
4. Payment Processing
Once an invoice is approved, the payment process can begin:
Managing Approvers: BILL requires assigning approvers at the vendor level in BILL. Keep in mind that this may change over time, and having a flexible process in place is crucial.
Payment Approval: After the invoice is approved by the designated approver for a vendor, your finance team will schedule the payment. BILL offers various payment methods, including ACH transfers, checks, and international payments, depending on your company’s preferences.
Payment Timing: After submitting for processing, BILL takes 2-4 days to process the payment which is important to keep in mind to ensure committed payment dates are met. When setting up their account, vendors have the option to receive payments with a 1 day processing time for a fee of 1%. When pushing payments, payors have the option of sending same day ACH for a fee of $10 per payment.
5. Ongoing Management
BILL’s platform includes features to help with ongoing payment management:
Payment History: Both the influencer and your finance team can access a detailed record of all invoices and payments made through BILL. However, typically, the business team does not have access to this information unless specifically granted, which can limit visibility for those managing influencer relationships.
Updating Vendor Information: If an influencer needs to update their payment details or other information, they can do so directly within their BILL account. Keeping this information up-to-date is essential to avoid any payment delays
Note: Your influencers may find it difficult to find relevant information in Bill such as payment history or where to update their information:
6. Tax Compliance
BILL can assist with tax compliance, but there are several steps to be aware of:
W-9 Form: Influencers must submit a W-9 form to comply with tax reporting requirements. This can be requested and submitted through BILL, but ensuring that all tax information is accurately provided is critical.
1099 Reporting: At the end of the year, you’ll need to generate 1099 forms for the IRS and the influencers, depending on how much they were paid throughout the year.
Challenges When Using BILL for Influencer Payments
While BILL offers many strengths, it’s not without its challenges, especially when managing payments for influencers, affiliates, and UGC creators:
Complex Onboarding Process: Establishing a streamlined process for onboarding and paying new influencers is crucial. BILL requires manual tracking to ensure all necessary information is gathered and that the influencer is fully set up before payments can be made.
Invoice Tracking: One of the most significant pain points is tracking when influencers are ready to be paid. The finance team often needs to manually verify if all information is correct and if the influencer has completed their setup, which can delay payments.
Limited Visibility for Marketing Teams: Typically, the influencer team doesn’t have access to the invoice status in BILL unless granted by the finance team. This lack of visibility can create communication challenges and delays.
Rigid Approver Assignment Framework: In BILL, once someone is set up as an approver for an account, all future approvals for that influencer must go through that approver. This setup is inflexible, especially when dealing with agencies that may require different approvers for various influencers. BILL does not support different approvers based on project or campaign.
Communication Hurdles: Ensuring clear communication between your finance team, influencer team, and the influencers themselves is critical to avoid any misunderstandings or delays in the payment process.
How Lumanu Helps with Influencer Payments:
Seamless Integration with existing ERP or Vendor Management systems (e.g.) Coupa: Lumanu acts as a single vendor for all influencer payments within a company's existing financial software. This simplifies the payment process, for example instead of creating a PO for EVERY vendor and payment, POs can be created at the campaign level or monthly/ quarterly. Lumanu can sit as a single vendor within BILL for companies who's Finance team use BILL for all other vendors.
Following this process on a periodic basis saves significant time and reduces manual errors, ensuring timely and accurate payments.
Comprehensive Vendor Onboarding and Support: Lumanu handles all aspects of vendor onboarding and support, making it easy for both the business and influencers. This reduces the administrative burden on your team, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than operational tasks.
Granular role based permissions: Lumanu supports budgeting and scheduling payments by project or campaign. Each project or campaign can have a different set of users who are responsible for creating, approving and making payouts.
Master Vendor who Manages Compliance: BILL is a money transmitter which helps you pay others. Lumanu acts as your single vendor for influencer payments, verifying submitted tax documentation is correct and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations, which means less work for your finance team.
Dedicated Payment Network: As a payment network, Lumanu provides a more specialized and streamlined solution for managing influencer payments. Similar to consumer apps like Venmo or PayPal, creators and talent managers only need to onboard to Lumanu once. Lumanu’s focus on influencers means that the platform is built to meet the unique needs of influencers and talent management.
Using BILL for influencer, affiliate, and UGC creator payments can streamline your financial operations but requires careful setup and management to avoid potential pitfalls. It may work well for smaller teams who can deal with the workflow of paying a few creators, but support costs and complexity increases with more creators and more team members. By understanding both the strengths and challenges of the platform, you can develop a process that ensures timely and accurate payments while maintaining compliance with tax regulations.
By
Lumanu
Aug 16, 2024
© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.
© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.
© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.
© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.
© 2024 Lumanu, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lumanu, Inc. is a financial technology company and not a bank. Lumanu accounts are provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC.