What it means for a payment method to pay a talent

A payment method on your account is a payout destination — a bank account, a card, or another route we can send money to. It is how deal money reaches you: a brand pays into escrow when the deal is agreed, and once the work is delivered we release it through the method that deal is set to use.

On its own a method does nothing. Money only moves when a method is allowed to pay a particular talent.

Which talent a method can pay

Every method carries a list of the talent it can pay, and every talent carries the list of methods that can pay them. They are two readings of the same thing, which is why the dashboard offers both. Adding a talent to a method is additive and reversible: it does not move money, it does not change a deal, and it can be taken away again.

None of this happens on its own. A brand new method reaches nobody until you say who it is for, and that is deliberate — an account managing several talent should never have one talent's earnings land in the wrong account because a default guessed.

Three things a talent can be doing

Once a method can pay a talent, what that talent is doing with it is always one of three things, and the dashboard labels each one:

• In an active deal — an accepted deal that still owes money is set to pay through this method. This is the state where taking the method away has consequences.
• In an open proposal — the talent is mid-negotiation on something that has not been accepted yet.
• Not in use — the method can pay this talent and nothing is currently relying on it. Most of them are here, and that is healthy rather than a problem to clear.

Not in use does not mean unusable. It means nothing is depending on it right now. A talent can be Not in use on one method while being paid through a different one.

Taking it away again

Removing is allowed even when a deal is relying on it. Rather than refusing, we detach the method from every deal it was paying and tell you which deals those are before you confirm. Those deals then have no way to be paid until you give them one, so the confirmation names them for a reason — read the list.

Why a method might still not pay

Being allowed to pay a talent is our half of the arrangement. The other half belongs to our payments provider, who has to be satisfied that the payout details behind the method are complete and valid. A method can be perfectly able to pay a talent as far as we are concerned and still be unable to send money, because that setup is unfinished. The two are independent, and the dashboard reports them separately.