Paying your crowd, how to pay crowdsourced freelancers quickly

Your business opportunities require the services of language professionals across many languages from many different countries. Features exist at ProZ.com and other freelancer platforms for you and your vendor managers to quickly recruit many freelancers for your job in translation, interpreting, subtitling, transcription and more. Your project managers may deploy these tools to recruit talent to complete the work.

How will you pay this crowd of freelancers? 



The easy answer, use ProZ*Pay. Share who to pay, when and how much... and ProZ*Pay can take care of the rest. If you want to try ProZ*Pay, no need to read the rest of this post. Email me and I'll help.


Here is a road map for paying your crowd



Decide when to pay

Set proper payment terms with your freelancers. Will you allow those in need to get paid early? Are you paying 30 days after the work is completed? 15 days after an audit? Do you need to wait to get the money? Is it your policy to wait until after money is received from your end client?

Either way, this will be something your freelancers will expect to know.

Make sure freelancers are payable

This should probably happen before a freelancer starts on your project.

Is your business limited to certain financial options like wire transfers or PayPal?
Some countries will not accept PayPal. In others, the banking costs might be higher than the amount you were paying the freelancer.

Some countries are off limits for sending money per your government or theirs. Are there sanctions against the country where your freelancer resides?

Are all of the freelancers on your project payable?

Find out how your freelancers want to get paid

Your freelancers will have payment preferences and needs based on their location, financial situation or personal preference.

Some may want to get paid using PayPal, Payoneer, Skrill or Wise (formerly Transferwise). Some may not have one of those accounts or be able to accept payment using that service in their country.

Others may want to receive money in their bank account. Some might have a US or EUR account they prefer. Others may not have a bank at all and need mobile payments  or pick up cash.

Choosing the wrong payment method for your freelancer might cost you (or the freelancer) more than expected. 

Are you willing to meet them on their terms?



Organize to make all the payments

Using a ledger, spreadsheet or translation management system, get all your payments into one place.

Match the amounts with each person, creating one total and all the individual invoices so that your freelancer knows exactly how much they are being paid and why.



Make the payments

Open PayPal, Skrill, Payoneer, your banking system and either enter those payments one-by-one... or use bulk paying options.

Be sure to double check that you have paid everyone and have not paid anyone twice. Mistakes will cost your business money.



Support those who have not been paid

Some of the payments will land instantly.
Others may take days to reach their destination.

For the next few days after payday, expect to hear from some of your freelancers with questions about their payment. Getting paid is an emotional experience so there will be concern about the process, fear of failures and finally satisfaction on seeing the money in their account.

Was the PayPal email correct? Was the amount as it was expected? Should the currency exchange rate have gone better? Did their wire transfer get flagged as part o a compliance review? Expect a few support emails from every pay day... especially if you are paying a new crowd.

I'm no accountant, but I hope this payroll story helps in your process. 

If you want to get most of this off your plate, pay freelancers how they want and get them paid early, find out how ProZ*Pay can help.