2.1. Payment scenarios and possible solutions: Upwork

Upwork is a global freelancing platform where businesses and freelancers can e-meet and work together. 

Just as PayPal, Upwork is also operating on a global scale, offering fast, safe and easy payout opportunities.

“With millions of jobs posted on Upwork annually, freelancers are earning money by providing companies with over 5,000 skills across more than 70 categories of work.” They are aiming to bring visibility and trust in a limitless remote workspace.

Also, Upwork managed to connect us with many outstanding and talented testers who contributed to our continuous growth during the years.

Advantages for Upwork users:

• You can link your Upwork account to various bank accounts, such as Wire Transfer, PayPal, Skrill, and Payoneer, that gives you the confidence that even if PayPal is not available in your country, you can still be paid.
• Upwork has a well-developed system to protect its freelancers and clients. If you work through Upwork and carefully follow the platform’s regulations, you’ll have full payment protection and legal assistance, if needed.

This is how Upwork generally works:

1. Based on your profile settings, you can bid on a job or you can be invited by the client to join their project
2. Once all the details are set, the client will create a contract (which automatically implies to deposit the amount you’ll receive after completing the task)
3. Upwork contracts should be accepted by you. However, these only last 7 days, thus we recommend accepting it as soon as possible.
4. If you confirmed the correctness of the contract, you can start to work 
5. Once the project is done, the payment will be released

Note, that just as in the case of PayPal, there are countries that are not supported by Upwork and you’ll not be able to create an account.

Based on our long-term experience with Upwork, we figured it out how to adjust their system in a way that fits us and our freelancers' needs as well.

First of all, due to the nature of our testing and the frequency at which we run projects, as well as the hundreds of freelancers we work with, we don't generally create contracts in advance as it is almost impossible to keep track of everyone who has and more importantly who has not performed their tasks.

Normally, we create a contract once the work has been confirmed. This allows us to initiate the contract based on the value of the work, and continue to send the payment for all other projects freelancers may take part in.

Why are we creating contracts only after the job is done?

It’s simple. We usually don’t know in advance what the final amount will be.

Examples: 

• If you jump on a functional exploratory test, you will be paid based on the number and severity of the bugs you report.
• If you take part in a test case execution, you will have a fixed payment + bonuses for bug reports based on their number and severity)

As you can see, the final amount is not fixed in any of the above cases. If we would create the contracts in advance with fictive amounts, we would have to keep track of them and correct them before releasing the payment. This would consume a lot of resources on our side which we don’t have at the moment and it might result in accidental payment-related errors that we would really like to avoid.

We will also not be creating new contracts for each individual task and instead will use the same recurring contract to continue the collaboration.