Paying advocates for referrals they drive reinforces the value they provide to your brand. Roster simplifies the process of tracking referrals and sending payments so that you can spend more time focusing on growing your advocate communities.
This guide focuses on sending payments automatically through the PayPal Payouts integration. If you want to send payments manually outside of Roster , refer to the guide on Sending Payments Manually.
Prerequisites
Add funds to your PayPal account
Request payment info from advocates
Add Funds to your PayPal Account
PayPal requires that your PayPal balance has enough funds to cover the total amount of the payments plus the PayPal fees. If your PayPal account has insufficient funds when you submit a payment, the entire batch will fail. Always check your PayPal balance before sending a payment within Roster. Learn more about PayPal Payout fees.
Request Payment Info from Advocates
Advocates will need to provide their preferred payment method before you are able to send them payments. Advocates provide their payment info within the Advocate Portal.
There are several ways advocates can be prompted to provide their payment info:
1. Using the Request Payment Info action on the Unpaid tab. This can be done per-row by clicking the mail icon, or as a bulk action by selecting one or more advocates and clicking the Request Payment Info action. When invoked, it provides an email template pre-populated with a message to prompt advocates to provide their payment into.
2. Using the Payment Info Link email token in email templates. This token will be turned into into a hyperlink to the payment information page within the advocate portal and is included by default in several referral-related email templates, such as the New Referral Reward and Reward Approved templates.
3. The Payment Info banner in the Advocate Portal. When an advocate logs into the Advocate Portal, if they are in a program that offers referral rewards, and the advocate has not yet provided their payment info, they will be prompted with a banner and link to provide their info.
Sending Payments via PayPal and Venmo
Integrating PayPal Payouts with Roster is a great way to simplify the process of paying advocates for their referral rewards. The PayPal Payouts integration also has the benefit of allowing advocates to receive payments to their Venmo wallet.
Step 1: Select Which Advocates to Pay
Navigate to Payments to view the list of payments that are available to send. The Unsent tab displays a list of all advocates who currently have approved, but unpaid referral rewards.
Use the filters to find the advocate(s) you wish to pay. For example, if you want to send store credit to all advocates who have provided their PayPal payment info, select PayPal from the Payment Method dropdown.
Once you have selected which advocates to pay, you will want to double check that you have sufficient funds in your PayPal account to cover the total payment amount plus the PayPal fees. Upon confirming, select Send PayPal & Venmo Payments.
Step 2: Send Payments to PayPal
The Send PayPal & Venmo Payments modal dialog will confirm the total number of advocates, the total rewards, and the total amount to be sent to PayPal Payouts.
If you set up a Payment Password when adding the PayPal Integration, you will be required to enter it here in order to proceed with the payment. This is not the same as your PayPal password.
Step 3: Downloading the Payments CSV
Clicking on the Paid tab will display a list of all payments that have been sent to PayPal. Clicking the Export CSV button will download a list of all payments in the list.
Payment Batch
Each time payments are marked as Paid, they are included in batch and share the same Payment Batch identifier. To export all payments in a batch, copy the Payment Batch from one of the payments and paste it into the Payment Batch filter. Clicking Export CSV will only export the payments that are displayed in the list.