This is a continuation of the Hands-On With The Elance Work System by Matt Katsaros. To read the previous part, follow this link here: Hands-On With The Elance Work System: Part 5.

After spending a little bit of time with amstudio utilizing the tools in the Workroom, the website is done, delivered, and ready to go. Now it’s time to foot the bill and get our provider paid, and Elance has a payment system designed to do exactly that.



One of Elance’s payment features (and one of my personal favorite features of using Elance) is Escrow. The service allows you and your provider both to be protected during the transaction. If you’re a little unfamiliar with how Escrow works, here it is in a nutshell: You and your provider agree to a job, you (the client) put the money in Escrow and leave it to be held by a third party, the provider begins work, and once you’re completely satisfied, the money gets released and your provider gets paid. (For more on Escrow, check out this help topic.)

(Now remember, Escrow is optional on fixed-price jobs. If you're planning on doing an hourly-based job, check out our hourly payment help topic here.)

The Escrow service that Elance offers makes the payment process simple, and more importantly, safe. As I mentioned in the last post, Elance uses milestones to split up the work and payments of your job. At any point throughout your job, you can fund the Escrow for any or all of your milestones. Once a milestone is deemed complete by both you and your provider, you then fund (if not done already) and release the Escrow. Here is how we do that.

Amstudio and I have been working together to get the Cloud Telecomputers site finished. It’s now complete and looks fantastic and I am more than satisfied, so now I begin the payment process.

To do this, I go up to the PAY tab (from anywhere on the site) and click Make Payment from the dropdown list. Here I will see a list of all the jobs I am currently working on. I am going to select the Cloud Telecommuters website job and click next. Then I see our project complete milestone for the completion of the job with a fund and release button next to it.



I have not been on top of things and have yet to fund my Escrow so I will do that now. I simply click the fund button, which takes me to the funding Escrow page. Here I select the payment type, type in my password and press the fund Escrow button. To release the escrow, I repeat the same steps but first by pressing the release button next to the project complete milestone. That’s it. Just a couple clicks and I have now funded, released, and ultimately paid amstudio for the great job he did.



Although the work is finished and amstudio has been paid, we’re not quite done yet. We have one more very important step in the process of working online – it’s time to leave some feedback.

Up next in the Hands-On With The Elance Work System Series: The feedback and ratings system. We'll follow Matt as he scores amstudio on the job well done – stay tuned.