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How marketplace funding, work, and payments flow on Service Envoy

Who's who in this article. On the marketplace, the company posting work is referred to as the client and the technician is the company performing the work. Where this article says external customer, it means the client's customer: the external, off marketplace company you're doing the work for, who has no Service Envoy login and sees things only through a link you share with them.

1. Funding a ticket (Funded per Site Visit)
When you post work to the Service Envoy marketplace, you fund it up front — or, in Offer mode, you can post a site visit without funding first to gauge technician interest, then fund the full agreed amount when you accept a technician's request. (Route mode always requires funding first, since the first tech to accept is assigned instantly.) Either way, the money sits in your marketplace balance until it's approved out to the technician who completes the work. You can fund with:

Unspent funds always stay in your marketplace balance and can be applied to any future ticket or withdrawn — they're never lost.

2. Technician submits work for approval
After a tech completes their site visit, they submit a closeout for your review. It appears on your dashboard under "Site Visits Needing Approval," and you get an in-app notification plus a daily email while it's open.

3. You approve (or raise a problem)
You review the submitted work and click Approve for payment. There is no auto-approval — submissions stay in "Pending" until you act. We send a reminder at 72 hours. At 7 days the visit is escalated to Service Envoy and you're reminded again, with a final reminder at 14 days, plus a daily digest while anything is pending. Escalating never approves or pays anything; only you do.

Hours and expenses are separate decisions. A pay increase (extra hours) and an expense reimbursement each have their own Approve and Deny buttons, so you can approve the parts and deny the hours, or the other way round. Approve all & release payment approves whatever is still pending and pays the technician in one step.

Countering the hours. If you'll only pay for a certain number of hours, click Counter hours and enter Hours I'll approve, with a note. The site visit goes back to the technician, who sees that number on the visit and in their email. They either change their pay request (or their times) to match and re-submit, or re-submit with a note explaining their hours. Expense decisions you already made stay made, and nothing about their pay changes until they re-submit. To send it back for any other reason, use Decline submission.

Approving more hours. A technician's pay can stop at a set number of hours (for example, hourly capped at 6 hours). If they stayed longer with your OK but didn't send a pay increase request, you don't have to wait for one. When the recorded time is more than their pay covers, click Approve more hours, enter the hours you'll pay for (up to the time they recorded), and add a note if you like. The screen shows how much their pay goes up before you confirm. Their pay rises straight away and they're told; nothing goes back to them to re-submit. On a marketplace visit you're asked how to fund the extra before anything is charged: from your marketplace balance, or by card or ACH. Your customer's bill is a separate setting and doesn't change. Then approve the visit as usual. Use Counter hours only when you want to pay for fewer hours.

When the technician asks first. A technician who works past their cap can send a pay increase request with the hours they worked, before or while they submit. It shows on the visit's Financials tab with its own Approve and Deny buttons. Approving it raises their pay and their hour cap to match. On a marketplace visit, approving a pay increase or an expense first asks how you want to fund it, and nothing is charged until you choose. Every change to a visit's funding shows on its Activity tab with the new total funded.

Raising your customer's limit. What you bill your customer and what you pay the technician are separate rates, each with its own hour limit, and changing one never changes the other. If you raise or remove the hour limit on your customer's bill and the technician recorded more time than their pay covers, the visit asks whether to pay them for it too. Before they've submitted for approval, Edit technician pay opens their rate with the limit already raised. Once they've submitted, Approve more hours opens with the hours filled in, because the amount you approve is the one they submitted.

If a site visit sits waiting on your approval for 7 days, it is escalated to Service Envoy and the technician can ask for a review (step 7). The clock only runs while it's your turn. If you mark the Client Deliverables missing or incomplete (step 4), the visit is waiting on the technician: it isn't escalated and it drops out of your approval reminders. When the technician uploads, it shows Deliverables Updated and your 7 days start from then. Notes, holds and escalations don't pause the clock. While Client Deliverables is flagged, nobody can approve the visit for payment, not even Service Envoy support. If something is wrong with the work, flag the deliverables, add a note that explains the problem, or escalate the visit to Service Envoy, so whoever reviews it can see why it's waiting. The point of the 7-day escalation is to stop a technician being ignored indefinitely, not to punish you for a job you're actively working through.

4. Missing deliverables block approval
On every site visit, the Client Deliverables status records whether the technician's photos, reports, and paperwork are actually all there. If you set it to DELIVERABLES MISSING or DELIVERABLES INCOMPLETE, the Approve for Payment button is disabled until that's resolved. This exists because approving is easy to do on autopilot, and paying for work whose documentation never arrived is very hard to unwind afterwards.

You can set this at any point, including after the visit has been submitted for approval by the tech or billed to your external customer — it saves on its own and does not need the page's Save button. The technician can still upload deliverables while this is set. When they do, the status moves to DELIVERABLES UPDATED and we email you to take a look — but approval and invoicing stay blocked. It deliberately does not jump to "complete": the system knows a file arrived, not whether it's the right one. Only you can say that, by setting DELIVERABLES COMPLETE. If an upload released the payment by itself, any file at all would do it.

Your external customer can raise this too. If you send them a share link with Let them report missing deliverables enabled, they can flag a visit themselves — which holds the payout and blocks approval and invoicing exactly as if you had flagged it, and emails the technician what is missing in their own words. They can clear it again once everything arrives. They are the ones paying for the work, so their verdict on whether they got it is the one that counts.

5. Holding a payout
If you have a problem with the work itself — wrong equipment, something left unfinished, hours that don't match what you believe happened — you can put the technician's payout on hold from the site visit. A held payout will not release on payday, however long it sits there, until you lift the hold.

You are asked for a reason, and the technician is shown that reason on their Payments page. Explain it to them: a hold with no explanation just tells someone their money stopped, with nothing they can act on. A hold is not a refusal to pay — it stops the clock while the two of you sort it out.

A hold you placed is one you can lift. A hold that came from your external customer disputing the reported hours (below) is lifted by resolving that dispute instead, so settling one can never accidentally clear the other.

6. Optional: let your external customer approve the hours first
When you share a project or a site visit with your external customer, you can tick Share Tech Times for Approval on the share link. They'll then see each site visit's technician on-site and off-site times — in the site's local time — and can either approve them or dispute them, with a one-click filter on the share page for everything still waiting on them. This happens before you approve, which is the point: it's much easier to settle a disagreement about hours while the money is still on the platform.

If your customer disputes, we email you immediately, the site visit shows what they say the times should have been along with their explanation, and the technician's payout is placed on hold so it can't release on payday while the hours are in question. Nothing your customer submits changes your records — you decide whether to accept their times or keep the technician's, and either choice closes the dispute and lifts the hold. If you try to approve while a dispute is still open, we'll warn you and ask you to confirm. The assigned technician is told their reported hours are being reviewed and can add their own account, but never sees your customer's identity or their note unless you choose to pass it along.

7. If you don't approve, it's escalated
If 7 days pass without your approval, the visit is escalated to Service Envoy automatically, and the technician can also request administrative review from then on. Service Envoy support looks at the visit and can approve it for payment, release an approved payout ahead of payday, reopen the visit so you and the technician can agree the terms again (you're both told why), or clear a dispute so the payout goes back to the normal payday schedule. Every action is logged. Support can't approve a visit while its deliverables are flagged missing or incomplete. If a client is unresponsive, Service Envoy may approve and release funds after a thorough review.

8. Payment release — weekly payday
Approved payouts are released on a weekly payday: the first Thursday on or after your approval date plus a 7-day cooling-off period (an effective hold of about 7–13 days, U.S. Central time). The cooling-off window protects both sides — it gives you a buffer to catch post-visit issues and gives Service Envoy time to investigate any reported problems before money leaves the platform. On payday, the technician's Stripe account receives the net payment: gross minus our 10% platform fee on labor and travel; parts and expenses are paid through at 100%. (Abusing the 100% parts/expense pass-through to dodge the labor fee will result in suspension.)

9. Requests for Additional Pay or Expense Reimbursement
If a site visit extends past the pre-approved rate limit, or the tech is asked to provide parts or supplies to complete the site visit, a technician may submit a request for additional pay or expense reimbursement. The client may approve, or decline the request and negotiate with the technician a fair final amount. The approval of additional pay and/or expenses is separate from approving the overall site visit for payment to the technician. Forgot to ask before the client approved the site visit? The technician's company can still file a Late Expense Reimbursement or Late Pay Increase from the visit's Tech Actions menu until the payout is released. If the client approves it, it's added to that same payout; either way, the original payment releases on schedule.

10. Refunds
If a site visit is approved for less than originally funded (the tech finished under budget, or the rate was adjusted down), the unused portion is automatically refunded to your marketplace balance. Funds you've deposited but not yet spent stay in your balance for future tickets. Note: the processing fees you paid to deposit money are not refunded if you withdraw, since those covered the deposit transaction itself.

11. Disputes & chargebacks
If you have a problem with a tech's work, act on it before the cooling-off window closes — put the payout on hold, mark the deliverables short, or escalate the visit to Service Envoy. A time dispute raised by your external customer through a shared project link puts the technician's payout on hold automatically, and it stays on hold until you resolve it. Chargebacks should be an absolute last resort. Filing a chargeback on a marketplace charge triggers a marketplace freeze on your account — it blocks all funding (card, Affirm AND ACH), all top-ups, and all withdrawals until the dispute is resolved and the freeze is manually cleared by Service Envoy. If your account is frozen, you'll be notified and given an appeal path.

When the technician arrives and the site isn't ready

Sometimes a technician arrives and the work can't go ahead: no site access, the site contact never showed, or the site wasn't prepared. The technician checks out with the outcome Site Not Ready. They pick a reason, describe what happened on site, and must have been on site at least 15 minutes. The site visit isn't cancelled. It shows an orange Site Not Ready status, the ticket moves to Additional Site Visit Pending, and you're notified. The site visit shows a Site Not Ready card with the reason, the technician's note and their time on site.

Next, the technician's pay for the trip is agreed:

When the technician accepts your amount, or submits the visit after your fee applied or you confirmed their pay, the visit comes to you for approval like any other: open it and choose Approve. Nothing is paid until you do. Once you approve, on the Tech Marketplace the agreed amount is paid from the visit's funding and the rest goes back to your balance; on the Private Network it shows as owed under Tech Payments Due on the dashboard's Financials card.

To send someone back, choose Schedule Return Visit on the Site Not Ready card. It creates a copy of the site visit with the pay that was agreed before the Site Not Ready.

Late cancellations. If you cancel before the technician checks in and they were already on the way, use Site Visit Actions → Offer Cancellation Fee instead of cancelling outright. The technician accepts or declines it. Once the technician has checked in, a cancellation fee isn't available. They check out as Site Not Ready and the pay is agreed as above.

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