How to pay your accepted Creators

When the brief is complete and your Creators are ready to be paid, here’s how the pay workflow works on Cohley.

Where payments happen

Payment actions live in the Completed stage of each brief. Once your Creators have delivered, been approved, and are in Completed, you’ll be able to send payment.

On each brief, you can choose to:

• Send Mass Payment — pay every Creator in the Completed stage (who hasn’t been paid yet) in one action
• Send Payment per individual Creator — pay a single Creator at a time

Important: Make any individual compensation adjustments before using Mass Payment. Mass Payment uses each Creator’s budget.

The pay-by date

Cohley automatically sets a pay-by date for every accepted Creator on a brief: 30 days from the brief’s content due date. Every Creator on the same brief shares the same pay-by date — submitting content early doesn’t move it earlier.

You can trigger payment any time within that window. We recommend requesting funds (see How to add funds to your Cohley account) as soon as Creators are accepted so funds are ready when it’s time to pay.

Checking how much you need

You have two views into upcoming Creator compensation:

• On a brief — open the brief to see Cohley funds and Expected funds for all accepted Creators
• On your Cohley homepage — see total upcoming Creator compensation across all your briefs

If you don’t have sufficient Cohley funds when you go to pay, you’ll see a red Add Cohley funds button — see How to add funds to your Cohley account for the funding methods.

Mass Payment flow

1. Open the brief and go to the Completed stage
2. Click Send Mass Payment
3. Confirm the total amount and the number of Creators matches your expectations
4. Confirm to send

Mass Payment includes every Creator in Completed who hasn’t been paid yet, at their budget.

Individual Payment flow

1. Open the brief and go to the Completed stage
2. Click Send Payment next to the specific Creator
3. Confirm the amount
4. Confirm to send

Use this when you want to adjust compensation for one Creator (e.g., a negotiated rate that differs from the budgeted amount).

Splitting a payment across deliverables

If a Creator has more than one deliverable, you can pay them in installments — part now, the balance once their remaining work is approved. This is useful when a Creator has had one deliverable approved while another is still in progress.

Payments can only be sent from the Completed stage, but moving a Creator there is reversible — that’s what makes staged payment possible.

1. Move the Creator to the Completed stage
2. Click Send Payment next to that Creator
3. Change the amount to the portion you’re paying now (e.g., $500 of a $1,000 budget) and confirm
4. Move the Creator back to Content to Review or Pending Post
5. When the remaining deliverable is approved, move them to Completed again and send the balance

Important: Don’t skip step 4. If a Creator stays in Completed after a partial payment, they won’t be triggered for their remaining deliverable, and your Completed count will include Creators who still have work outstanding.

The Creator receives each installment as a separate payout and is notified each time. Cohley doesn’t track which payment covers which deliverable, so keep your own record of what each installment was for.

Cohley doesn’t take a cut

100% of the Creator compensation goes to the Creator. Cohley does not charge a fee or commission on payments to Creators.

Tax forms and 1099s

Your brand does NOT need to send 1099s to Creators. Cohley payments go through PayPal, and PayPal is responsible for issuing 1099s where applicable. See Creator tax forms and 1099’s for the full explanation.

If you paid a Creator twice

A duplicate payment has already reached the Creator, so manual steps are needed by them.

Start the conversation in the brief chat so there’s a record on the brief: let the Creator know they were paid twice, that the extra payment needs to be sent back, and ask them to contact support@cohley.com for instructions.

Support will walk the Creator through sending the money back and watch for it to arrive — that’s what lets us add the amount back to your Cohley account. Please don’t arrange the transfer directly, because funds we aren’t expecting can’t be matched to your account.