Disable Scheduled Payment

[webberg]

Hello,

Is there any chance that you can introduce an option to disable automatic scheduled payments? Or at least make some notification in advance, few days before it. It's kind of frustrating when all your balance goes out of the system when you missed the scheduled day. I prefer to make payments manually and don't really need that Scheduled Payments. 

[g_vasilevski]

Hi Nikolay,

Thank you for your feedback, I will share this with our team.

[38c78689]

I have seen this same question asked previously

I have seen that exact same reply previously

How about getting it done  !!

Agree with you in full.

The Employer should have the option to turn off Auto Pay.

I have just had a contractor submit an invoice that was paid without my knowledge. Now this might be because I did not see an email, no idea, but it has happened. The contractor has not listed any details at all despite agreeing to do so initially. I cannot determine what he things has been done for the hours invested. I am flying blind.

Generally I NEVER pay by the hour for this very reason (no control) but this time I pretty much had to in order to get the work done. He seem to be a nice guy, but that is not the point.

I have gone to turn off auto pay and it appears I cannot do so. Not acceptable Upwork. Not all all.

[tinker_bell3]

Hi Mark,

It seems like you are referring to hourly contracts. For hourly contracts, as a client, you are automatically invoiced for the hours logged by the freelancer. You might want to check out these helpful articles to learn more about paying for hourly contracts: Pay for Hourly Contracts and Weekly Billing Summary. 

If you do not prefer to have your freelancer work on hourly contracts, you can choose to set a fixed-price contract instead. You might want to check out this help article for more information. 

[petra_r]

Here is a workaround.

Set a reminder on whatever calendar system you use for the week before.

Last week I changed the schedule from quarterly to monthly, which set the autowithdrawal to Wednesday 28th.

So nothing happened today.

Tomorrow I'll change it back to quarterly, which means I can relax again until the end of June!

It's a bit of a fuss but it only happens 4 times a year.

[webberg]

Right, looks as a workaround, but I think it's better to have an option in payment settings. Not sure why Upwork still does not have it... looks so obviouse 🙂

[tlsanders]

Nikolay, Upwork does not have it because Upwork isn't a bank and doesn't want to keep your money. In fact, there's a legal limit on how long Upwork can hold funds for you. The automatic payment system saves them from accumulating a bunch of money that has to be force-distributed when that time period expires.

[petra_r]

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@Tiffany S wrote:

Nikolay, Upwork does not have it because Upwork isn't a bank and doesn't want to keep your money. In fact, there's a legal limit on how long Upwork can hold funds for you. The automatic payment system saves them from accumulating a bunch of money that has to be force-distributed when that time period expires.

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 Oh sure, and I totally agree with it in principle as well, it is just a pain when you want to (as I do) distribute your funds to different withdrawal methods. (to "park Dollars" in my US account to wait for a better exchange rate for example, or I might want some in my UK bank account and some on PayPal) I had to remember to mess with the settings and do mental gymnastics last week as I had a $1700 milestone hit the day of the 3 month update and really needed to be able to chop that up.

If I at least had the ability to set the scheduled withdrawal to 2 different methods I'd not have to jump through hoops 4 times a year to avoid it all going to one place. My problem isn't that it's going, my problem is that it is all going to the same place.

[webberg]

Tiffany, you are right - Upwork is not a bank as banks are a financial institutions that accepts deposits from the public and creates credit. It is just not comfortable without an option to disable scheduled payment. In fact I can still delay the payments but by playing around with settings. If you take a look to the recent issues on the forum you will see that people are confused with that scheduled payments.

[tlsanders]

Yes, I have seen a lot of people confused about payment options. Some of that confusion may fall on Upwork, but a lot is due to the fact that a great many new freelancers don't bother to read about how things work before they get started. You've probably also seen the large number of panicked posts from freelancers saying clients have ripped them off, scammed them, not paid them, etc. simply because they never looked at how the payment process works.

You can delay payment for a while using workarounds like Petra described, but there is a hard line. I think it's 180 days, but I'm not sure. At that point, Upwork simply won't hold your money any longer, no matter what you've done with your settings.

[hashan_designer]

Thanks, for your valuable tips

Community Guru
Petra R

Please help me to know,

For Scheduled Payment upwork flow which date?

a>  UTC

or

b> my local date my time is BST (GMT/UTC+06:00) [Bangladesh, Dhaka]

or

c> USA date PDT (UTC -7) 

Please let me know,

Thanks again & best regards to upwork & everyone

[petra_r]

---

M. Mobinur H wrote:

Please help me to konw,

For Scheduled Payment upwork flow which date?

a>  UTC

or

b> my local date my time is BST (GMT/UTC+06:00) [Bangladesh, Dhaka]

or

c> USA date PDT (UTC -7) 

---

a > UTC

[marija_10]

[hassankhan14]

Is there any update on this question? Is there any way now to disable the automatic payment schedule?

Thanks