Should we release last payment before claiming ownership of work and site?

[60fd21c1]

Hi there,

I hope you can advise. We have posted a Wordpress website development job a long time ago. The freelacer has completed phase 1 and was paid. He 'completed' current phase 2 on his local server and transfered the site to our hosting server. We can check his work on the front end but he is denying access details to the WP editor (which is ours), until we release the last payment. If we have no access, we can not check the work properly. We also do not have 100% ownership of his work (and our site). What do we do? Do we release final payment and hope that he will provide access details, and fix any issues later?

I am confused,

Please advise.

Regards,

Martin  

[prestonhunter]

re: "Should we release last payment before claiming ownership of work and site?"

No.

Martin:

I want to be very clear about something:

The freelancer you hired is acting contrary to how the fixed-price contract model is intended to be used.

In fact, what he is doing could be grounds for suspension from Upwork.

But based on what you have told us, I can not tell you for certain whether or not he is a scammer, or a legitimate freelancer who is acting out of ignorance or unfounded fear.

My recommendation is to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume good will on his part.

So let's assume for the moment that he is simply unaware of how to do this properly. A freelancer should release all work to a client so that the client can review it. After the client has reviewed it, if agreed-upon work has been done, then the client releases the escrowed payment to the freelancer. This is very simple.

At this point, my recommendation to you would be to tell the freelancer:

"Joshua:

Thank you again for your work on this project. I am very new to Upwork and don't yet understand how everything works, which is why I was confused when you asked me to release payment before you provided the full project to me. I asked for help in the Community Forum, and this is what a highly-experienced freelancer said I should do. He said that you sound like a good freelancer who might just be confused about the proper order of things. He said to give you three options, and let you pick which one you want to do:

a) the freelancer can provide all work including access credentials immediately

b) the freelancer can come here to this Community Forum thread and talk things over with experienced Upwork freelancers, so that we can answer his questions and help both sides figure out what to do next in an amicable way

c) the freelancer can disagree with doing either (a) or (b), in which case the client needs to close the contract while asking for a full refund of all money left in escrow."