As an administrator of an experience, you or your portal administrators may chose to facilitate paid experience for your learners for completing projects. These payments can be issued through Riipen, or manually outside of Riipen by external payment providers.
General
Configuration
As an experience administrator, you have many different options to choose from for how payments are facilitated.
Payment types
An experience can be configured to issue payments with one of the following options:
Manual - payments are processed externally by a non-integrated third party system and payment statuses are manually updated to reflect any third party information.
In-platform - payments are issued from payment methods from the experience's portal and are automatically processed and updated through Riipen.
Invoice types
You can configure invoices to be generated for learner work product in the following ways:
Hourly - learners will create entries in a work log, details work performed and time spent. Invoices will be generated from these work log entries and learners will be paid an hourly rate.
Flat fee - learners will only ever have a single invoice which will be at the end of their project for the full amount of their defined payments.
Amount & currency
Experiences will configure an amount to pay learners in a selected currency. This amount will either be an hourly rate for hourly invoices, or the total amount for flat fee invoices.
Invoice payment splitting
By default, experiences are configured to have 100% of any invoice paid by the participating project's company. However, you can choose to configure a split of payments between the project / company and your experience / portal.
With split payments, you can decide on any split amount. For example, you can choose to have 40% of any invoice paid by your experience while the remaining 60% is paid by the project.
When split payments are enabled, every invoice will have 2 payments associated with it and each will be processed and charged to the appropriate party when the invoice is processed.
Approvals
Every invoice created for learners has the option to be reviewed by both experience and project administrators. You can toggle on or off each party individually as needing approval, but if the party is responsible for any part of the payment of the invoice, their approval will be turned on and cannot be disabled.
Each party's approval can also be configured to have an independent approval period. When an invoice enters the "pending" state, each party will have this configured approval period to either approve the invoice or dispute it. Failure to take any action at the end of this period will result in an automatic approval.
Thresholds & intervals
When your experience is using hourly invoices, additional configuration options are available to you.
Minimum payable hours - this setting allows you to specify a minimum number of hours that must be present in a learners work log before they can receive any invoice. This setting comes into play when a learner's project gets cancelled for any reason early into their work. The learner must have logged this many hours worth of work log entries or else they will receive no invoice. This cannot be higher than 10 hours.
Hours per invoice - this setting will determine when an invoice is generated based on a learners work logs. If this is set to 15 hours, then every 15 hours of work log entries a learner creates will trigger an invoice to be generated with any additional hours carrying over to the next invoice.
Conditions
You can configure specific conditions which must be met in order for a learner's invoice to be processed and paid. These settings can be for any invoice the learner receives, or their final invoice.
Survey - must have a response
Final deliverable - must be submitted
If these conditions are not met, a learner's invoice will still be generated as applicable, however, it will be put into a blocked state and will not move into needing approvals until the learner has completed the blocking conditions.
As an experience administrator, you will always have the ability to manually override these conditions per invoice by "unblocking" them on a case by case basis.
Invoice generation
While learners complete work on projects in your paid experience, invoices will be automatically generated for that completed work based on the invoice type set by the experience.
Hourly - an experience can be set to hourly, meaning that as learners make entries to their work logs, an invoice will be generated once they meet the experience's invoice hourly threshold. For instance, if a an experience is set to hourly invoices with a 15 hour interval, once a learner logs 15 hours worth of work log entries, an invoice for 15 hours will be generated with any additional hours rolling over to the next applicable invoice. The invoice generated will be for the applicable (15) hours at the hourly rate set by the experience. Any work log entries above the experience configured maximum hours for the project will not be invoiced.
Flat fee - an experience can be set to flat fee, meaning that only once a learner makes a final submission to the project, a single invoice be generated. The invoice generated will be for the full allotment of the project payment amount.
Invoice payments
Depending on how the experience is configured, payments will be generated for the invoice for the appropriate payers. For example, if an experience is configured so that payment of invoices is split 50% to the experience and 50% to the project, two payments will be generated for the invoice with the appropriate amount for the given split.
Any time an invoice is generated with a payment your experience is responsible for, you will be notified.
Invoice approval
Once an invoice is generated, you will be able to approve the invoice and thus allow the payments to be processed. Depending on experience configuration, you will have a specific number of days to review the invoice.
If you do not review and approve (or dispute; see below) the invoice in this time, it will be automatically approved and payments will be processed.
To avoid work product quality issues, it is imperative that you collaborate with your learner through the whole project.
If your project is being paid hourly, make sure you review work log entries as they are created.
Always conduct regular reviews of student work throughout the whole project.
If an experience is configured with split payments, meaning both your experience and the project are making payments towards an invoice, each party will have a separate ability to approve the invoice and only once both parties approve (or automatically approve at the deadline) will the invoice be processed.
Invoice states
At any point, an invoice will have a state associated with it indicating it's current state and likely what actions will be taken next.
State | Meaning |
Blocked | The invoice has been created but the learner must complete additional steps before it can be reviewed by the applicable parties. |
Pending | The invoice is pending approval from the applicable parties. |
Ready | The invoice has been approved, but the learner must complete further action to have the invoice processed |
Processing | The payment(s) for the invoice are currently being processed. |
Paid | The invoice has been paid in full. |
Paid partial | Some of the payments associated with the invoice have been processed but others are still pending. |
Cancelled | The invoice has been cancelled and payments will not be processed. |
Disputed | The invoice is currently being disputed. |
Declined | Upon dispute resolution, the invoice will not be processed. |
Payment states
Payments within an invoice each have a state associated with it indicating it's current state and likely what actions will be taken next.
State | Meaning |
Pending | The payment has been created, but is not ready for processing and is blocked by the invoice approval. |
Ready | The payment is ready to be processed. |
Processing | The payment is currently being processed. |
Accepted | The payment has been processed successfully. |
Errored | The payment has failed to process. |
Invoice disputes
If you believe there has been a breach of requirements between you and a learner in regards to a paid project in your experience, you will be able to dispute an invoice. You will need to provide forensic evidence of such a breach including but not limited to work product produced vs project scope.
To ensure your safety and reduce risk, always keep communication and work product produced on Riipen. Any dispute evidence submitted from tools outside of Riipen such as screenshots, data exports, etc, will be subject to Riipen's subjective analysis and may or may not be considered legitimate while reviewing a dispute.
Once submitted, a Riipen staff member will review your dispute, reaching out to you directly when it is necessary for more information.
All disputed invoices are reviewed by Riipen staff and any decision made by Riipen staff is binding and final.
How to
Enable payments
The following steps can be completed to enable payments on an experience.
Navigate to your experience
Click on the "Settings" tab
Click on the "Payments" tab in the "Advanced" group
Check "Enable payments to be issued to learners for completing projects"
Click "Submit".
A payments tab will now be visible for each team within the experience.
Configure payments
To configure payments such as setting an invoice type, default payment amounts, currency, or other:
Navigate to your experience
Click on the "Settings" tab
Click on the "Payments" tab in the "Advanced" group
Fill in the form as needed
Click "Submit"
Set payments instructions
You can set custom instructions or additional information for payments that will be seen by your learners by following these steps:
Go to the experience you want to set custom instructions for.
Click on the experience's “Settings” tab.
Select the “Payments” tab under the “Advanced" group.
Ensure payments are enabled
Fill in the "Instructions for learners" field
Click "Submit" to save
Create an invoice
While in most cases invoices will be generated as needed, if you need to create an invoice manually for a learner in your experience:
Navigate to the team page
Click on the "Invoices" tab
Click the "+ Create Invoices" button
Fill in the payment fields and click "Submit" to save it
View an invoice
To view an invoice for a learner within a team in your experience:
Navigate to the team page
Click on the "Invoices" tab
Click on the invoice you want to view
View history for an invoice
All invoices contain a full history of any interaction with them. To view this history:
Navigate to the team page
Click the "Invoices" tab
Click the invoice you want to view the history of
Click the "History" tab
Approve an invoice
To approve an invoice:
Navigate to the team page
Click the "Invoices" tab
Click the invoice you want to approve
Click the "Approve" button
Unblock an invoice
To unblock an invoice:
Navigate to the team page
Click the "Invoices" tab
Click the invoice you want to unblock
Click the "Unblock" button
Dispute an invoice
To dispute an invoice:
Navigate to the team page
Click the "Invoices" tab
Click the invoice you want to dispute
Click the 3-dot menu and then click the "Dispute" action
Follow the prompts on screen
Manually set the state of an invoice
If you have selected "manual" for your payments type, you will be able to set the state of an invoice manually at any time to reflect your external payment provider's state.
Navigate to the team page
Click on the "Invoices" tab
Click the invoice you want to update
Click on the action you wish to take to set the invoice state. Depending on the invoice's current state, some options may be unavailable to be selected.