How to pay contractors, and know what you paid

The IRS puts the test on control: a worker is an independent contractor when the payer has the right to direct only the result of the work, not what will be done and how. Most countries have the same idea under other names.

Orla does not classify anyone; that call belongs to your accountant or lawyer, and it comes before any payment.

Rate, currency, when it is due, which rail, and who pays the transfer fee. One line in the agreement that names the rail and the fee saves a dispute later, and if the rail is a stablecoin, that line has to name the network as well.

Bank details typed into a note get retyped into the bank every month. In Orla a contact keeps several payout rails at once: a bank rail picked by scheme, a crypto address per network, a PayPal email.

An IBAN or a US routing number with two digits swapped is refused as it is typed, which is the mistake that otherwise surfaces once the money is somewhere else. The same card holds the contractor's tax id and the documents you keep on them.

• SEPA and IBAN
• UK sort code
• US ACH
• SWIFT, for everywhere else

The IRS describes it as the way a payee gives their correct taxpayer identification number to the person who has to file an information return about them. That person is you. Ask for it before the first payment, not in January.

A foreign person who is the beneficial owner of the payment gives it to the payer. A foreign company gives W-8BEN-E instead.

It reports nonemployee compensation, and the current instructions set the line at $2,000 or more paid to one payee in the year. It is filed on or before January 31.

Your country has its own version, and the shape is the same everywhere: identify the payee, keep the form, report the total. In Orla the W-9 or W-8BEN sits on the contractor's contact card under Documents, next to their rails and tax id. Orla does not prepare or file 1099s and withholds nothing.

New payment asks how it is paid first, bank transfer or crypto, then the payee, the amount and the account it leaves.

The form says what the account holds, whether a rule leaves the proposer room this month, and whether the payee has an address this kind of money can reach: a TRON wallet offers the contact's TRON address, a bank account their IBAN. A payee with no address for that network is stopped in the form, not after sending.

A payout batch takes up to 200 rows, typed or imported from a CSV with a template to download. The import shows what it matched before anything is created: which payees are existing contacts, which become new ones, and which lines are broken.

A row that repeats a payment to the same contact for the same amount within three days is flagged before you submit, and submitting the same draft twice returns the same batch instead of paying twice.

Approval rules check the batch total, not each row, so a payout split into small rows still needs the signatures the whole amount would. Whoever proposes a payment cannot sign it. Address-book only forces a signature round for any destination that is not a trusted contact.

The signer's notification names the contact, the amount and the rail the send will use, and Sign batch approves or rejects every row in one action.

A signature approves a payment; the send is a separate last step, and each rail keeps its own.

• A plain bank account: Orla records the transfers, you make them in the bank, and Mark paid books each one with the bank's confirmation attached.
• Revolut Business or Airwallex: the run arrives in your bank as one draft that someone on your team sends there, and only what the bank paid is recorded as spent.
• Mercury: each payment is requested into your Mercury approval queue, and an admin approves it there. Mercury pays US dollars only.
• Slash or PayPal Payouts: a person presses Send via Slash or Pay via PayPal, and that press is the send.
• Your own wallet: the run sends every approved on-chain payment of one wallet, one transaction each, with the wallet unlocked once; unscreened addresses are screened first, and Stop lands between rows.

Every payment keeps who proposed it, who signed, when, and the reason for a refusal. An on-chain payment links its transaction id to the block explorer, with what the network actually charged.

The Payments page exports exactly what its filters show as a CSV, and the month's archive for the accountant carries the payments with who proposed and who signed.

A saved row list plus a schedule, monthly on a day or weekly. On the day Orla prepares the draft and tells its author it is ready. Sending is always a person's press, because who is on the list changes from month to month.

A run already sent can be copied into a fresh draft, which is how a typo in a 100-row list gets fixed without retyping it.

Under a payment that does not look like what this book usually does, Orla says which of three things it saw: the payee is being paid far more than usual, a payee never paid before is getting a large first amount by this book's own scale, or the same amount is going to the same payee twice within a week.

It explains and never blocks.

Forward their invoice to the space's own mail address and it becomes a draft bill for a person to accept. Payment details are never taken from the email: what to pay comes from the draft, where to pay comes from the contact card. Tick several bills and Pay selected pays them as one run, through the same rule.