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 manually, outside of Roster. If you want to send payments via PayPal and/or Venmo, refer to the guide on Sending Payments via PayPal and Venmo.
Prerequisites
Manual Payments Overview
Manual payments are payments that are tracked and marked as paid within Roster, but that are processed by your brand outside of Roster. (This is in contrast to sending payments within Roster using the PayPal/Venmo integration.)
For example, suppose you want to pay your advocates via your company's payroll service, which isn't integrated with Roster. Using manual payments, you would mark the payments as paid, and then export a CSV of the payments to be processed by your payroll service.
As another example, your brand might have policies in place that prevent integrating the brand's PayPal account in Roster. Assuming you want to pay your advocates through PayPal or Venmo, you could process the payments manually in Roster, export the CSV, and upload it to PayPal's Payouts web interface to send payments to your advocates.
Follow these steps to process payments manually:
Navigate to the "Unsent payments" to select which advocates to pay
Use the Actions button and select "Send Payments Manually"
Complete the manual payment to mark the unsent payments as "Paid". This creates a payment batch.
Go to the "Sent payments" tab and search by the unique payment batch ID you just created
Click the Export CSV button to download the list of payments from the batch
Upload your payments list to your 3rd party payment system to process the payouts
Step 1: Select Which Advocates to Pay
Navigate to Referral Rewards > Unsent Payments to view the list of payments that are available to send. The Unsent Payments tab displays a list of all advocates who have approved referral rewards, which have not yet been paid.
Use the filters to find the advocates 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 the advocates you wish to pay, click the Actions button and select "Send Payments Manually"
Step 2: Mark as Paid
The Send Payments Manually modal dialog will confirm the total number of advocates, the total rewards, and the total amount to be marked as paid.
The Payment Method section allows you to inform the advocates how they should expect to receive the payment.
By selecting "Advocates' Preferred Payment Method", the advocate will expect the payment to be sent to the method specified. For example, if you processed a manual payment and selected Advocates' Preferred Payment Method, you would then need to upload the payment CSV to PayPal in order for the payments to be sent.
By selecting Custom, and providing the custom payment method, the advocate will expect the payment to be sent to the method you provided. For example, if you processed a manual payment and indicated Store Credit as the custom payment type, you would then need to issue store credit to each advocate in the payment CSV.
Once you have provided all the required information, mark the payments as paid.
Step 3: Downloading the Payments CSV
Clicking on the Paid tab will display a list of all payments that have been marked as Paid. Clicking the Export CSV button will download a list of all payments in the list. This is helpful for sending payment information to a the system that will process the payments.
Payment Batch
Each time payments are marked as Paid, they are included in a 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 export the payments included in that batch.