How and when you get paid

This is the whole journey your money takes, from the moment a client approves your work to the moment it lands in your bank account. It is worth reading once in full, because most payment questions turn out to be a misunderstanding of one particular step.

The path, end to end

1. The client funds the work into escrow before you start.
2. You do the work and submit it.
3. The client approves it, or it auto-approves if they go quiet.
4. Commission is deducted and the rest is credited to your wallet, as Pending.
5. After the clearance period, that money becomes Available.
6. You withdraw it, or the automatic payout does it for you.
7. It arrives in your bank account.

Each of those steps has a reason and a timescale. The two people most often get caught by are step 5 and step 6.

Your wallet has two balances, and they are not the same thing

Open your Earnings page and you will see two figures. They mean genuinely different things.

Pending is money that is already yours. The client has approved, commission is already deducted, and nothing further needs to happen for you to receive it. It is simply inside its clearance window and cannot be withdrawn yet.

Available is money you can withdraw right now.

The single most common message support receives from freelancers is some version of "the client approved days ago and I still cannot withdraw". Almost every time, the money is in Pending and the clearance window has not finished. Nothing is wrong and nobody needs to do anything.

Why clearance exists

Clearance is a holding period between the money being released to you and it becoming withdrawable. It is measured in business days, so a weekend does not count toward it, which is why a Friday approval can feel slower than a Monday one.

It exists because card payments are reversible for a period after they are made. A client's bank can pull a payment back weeks later. If Open Lance paid every release out instantly, a reversed payment would mean money had left the platform that was never really there. The clearance window is the buffer that makes the guarantee behind escrow real rather than a promise.

Instant release, where a client chooses to pay out immediately on approval, shortens this. Whether it is offered depends on the contract.

The exact length of the window is shown on your Earnings page next to the pending amount, and it is set by platform configuration rather than fixed forever, which is why this article does not quote a number that would quietly go stale.

What Open Lance deducts

Commission is deducted at the moment money is released to you, not when you withdraw. What you see arrive in Pending is already net.

How much depends on what kind of work it was and whether you subscribe:

• Open Lance Ultra subscribers pay no commission on standard contract work. That is the point of the subscription.
• Freelancers without a subscription pay a percentage on standard contract work.
• Drop-In sales carry their own flat rate, which applies to every seller regardless of subscription, because a Drop-In is a productized sale rather than a negotiated contract.
• Monthly engagements carry their own flat rate for the same reason.

The live rate for any given payment is shown in the earnings breakdown for that transaction, and on the contract itself. Every release produces a ledger entry you can open, showing the gross amount, the commission line, and the net credited. If a figure ever looks wrong, that breakdown is the place to look first, because it shows the arithmetic rather than just the answer.

There is no charge for receiving work, no listing fee, and no cut taken from money sitting in your wallet.

Withdrawing

Withdrawals are requested from Earnings. Three things govern them.

A payout method. You need one set up and verified before you can withdraw. Open Lance supports bank transfer, Stripe Connect and Payoneer, and which are available depends on your country. A bank account is verified before first use, either by micro-deposit or by review, so allow for that the first time. This is the step to do early rather than on the day you want the money.

A minimum. Withdrawals below a minimum amount are not accepted, because the fixed cost of sending a payment makes very small transfers uneconomic for everyone. The current minimum is shown on the withdrawal screen.

A flat fee. A small flat platform fee is deducted per withdrawal request. It is flat rather than a percentage, which means withdrawing once a month costs you a great deal less than withdrawing four times a month for the same total.

A withdrawal is reviewed before it is dispatched. Most are straightforward; some are held briefly for a manual check, which is a normal anti-fraud control and not an accusation. You will see the status move through pending, approved and processing before completing. If one is ever rejected, the reason is given and the money is returned to your wallet rather than disappearing.

If you are paid in something other than US dollars

Your balance is held in US dollars. When you withdraw to an account in another currency, the money is converted at the point of payout.

Before you confirm, you are shown the amount you will receive in your own currency. That figure is the one that governs, and it already accounts for the cost of making the conversion, so there is no separate charge revealed afterwards. Estimates shown before a live rate is available are deliberately conservative, so the final amount is more often slightly better than the estimate than worse.

Setting up a payout method properly

This is the step that most often delays a first withdrawal, so it is worth doing on the day you start rather than the day you want paying.

Go to Earnings and add a payout method. What you can use depends on where you are:

• Bank transfer is available in most countries and is usually the cheapest route for the money.
• Stripe Connect is available where Stripe supports payouts to your country, and is generally the fastest.
• Payoneer covers a number of countries where direct bank payout is impractical.

Whichever you choose, the account has to be verified before it can receive money. Bank accounts are verified either by micro-deposit, where a tiny amount is sent and you confirm it, or by review. Neither is instant, so build in a couple of days.

Two things worth getting right the first time. The name on the payout account should match the name on your Open Lance account. Banks reject transfers where the names disagree, and the rejection comes back days later. And for compliance, a legal name is used rather than a display name or a business trading name, so use the name your bank has.

You can hold more than one method and pick a default. The automatic payout uses your default.

Reading your earnings ledger

Every movement of money produces a ledger entry, and the ledger is the answer to almost any "why is this number what it is" question.

Each release shows as its own set of lines: the gross amount for the work, the commission deducted, and the net credited to you. Withdrawals show the amount requested, the flat fee, and what was sent. Every entry carries a running balance after it, so you can trace the balance you have today back through every movement that produced it.

If a figure looks wrong, open the ledger before opening a ticket. It is much faster to see the arithmetic than to have someone describe it to you, and if it genuinely is wrong, quoting the entry makes it a two-minute investigation rather than a twenty-minute one.

The automatic payout, which you should know about

Open Lance runs an automatic payout. Where your available balance is at or above a threshold, a withdrawal is generated for you daily, to your default payout method.

Two things about it matter.

There is no opt-out. It is a deliberate limit on how much earned money accumulates on the platform rather than sitting with you, and it exists to protect you rather than us.

You can elect to keep a small amount in your wallet, up to a capped ceiling, if you want a working balance for buying bid packs or paying for a subscription without a card. The default is to keep nothing.

If money you were not expecting has arrived in your bank, this is usually why. Your withdrawal history shows every automatic payout alongside the ones you requested.

When something is actually wrong

Work through this in order before opening a ticket, because it resolves most cases in under a minute.

1. Has the client actually approved? Check the contract. Submitted is not approved.
2. Is the money in Pending? If so it is yours and clearance has not finished. There is nothing to fix.
3. Is your payout method verified and active? An unverified method blocks withdrawal.
4. Is the amount above the minimum?
5. Is there a hold on your account? A restriction is always shown on your dashboard with the reason.

If none of those explain it, open a support ticket and include the contract reference and the amount you expected. That is enough for someone to trace the exact ledger entries rather than asking you a round of questions first.

Related

• How escrow works, for where the money sits before it reaches you

Every purchase you make from Open Lance, such as a bid pack or a subscription, produces an invoice and a receipt as a PDF. They are emailed to you and kept in your billing area, so you have proper documents for your accounts rather than a line in a transaction list.