Transaction history - Messy

38c78689 · ‎03-06-2023

Good Morning,

I find the Transaction History report to be poorly constructed and difficult to read, especially when there are multiple transactions in one day.

a) No Freelancer appears under the Freelancer column. Only for a Bonus payment it seems, but not for the actualy job. Why ?

b) I see transactions such as ;

Mar 6, 2023 Payment Paid from PayPal ......

with no info on what that refers to. Why ?

And the View Invoice option is ridiculous. There simply is no useful information on the Invoice.

No Freelancer details

No Job details

Just an amount.

Totally meaningless when trying to work out what the payment or credit was for. This has to be fixed / more pertinent info added to the invoice !

Cheers

ArjayM · ‎03-06-2023

Hi Mark,

We truly appreciate your feedback and for bringing this to our attention. Your Transaction History page is the record of your payments that can be exported as a CSV file or used to bulk download payment invoices. Invoices include your company name, company owner's name, and company contact address. If you have a VAT number, that will be included, too. Your freelancer's verified name will always be included. Some freelancers also provide an invoicing address (this is optional).

You can check this help article to learn more.

~ Arjay

38c78689 · ‎03-07-2023

I appreciate your reply Arjay,

One thing I cannot stand though, is people who simply reply to posts with a lot of meaningless waffle, without addressing the actual issue in the post. Your reply is one of those.

You sated - "Your freelancer's verified name will always be included"

Explain to me where on the attached invoice the Freelancer's name appears. ?

Explain to me where on the attached invoice the Job information appears. ?

I repeat - There simply is no useful information on the Invoice.

No Freelancer details

No Job details

Just an amount.

Totally meaningless when trying to work out what the payment or credit was for. This has to be fixed / more pertinent info added to the invoice.

And why do we have to "download" the pdf to view it. Why is it not able to be simply opened in the browser like so many other sites. It is a pain having to download a file every time just to view it.

Upwork Management, are you listening ?

Cheers

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

AveryO · ‎03-07-2023

Hi Mark,

I'd like to share more information about your concerns. Please see some of my answers below.

a) No Freelancer appears under the Freelancer column. Only for a Bonus payment it seems, but not for the actualy job. Why ?

As you can see here, the freelancer's name was added to the column where the Bonus payment and the Marketplace Fee were charged to your account.

The freelancer's name will not be listed on any transactions on your Transaction History page (other than the Bonus) because no payments were processed. Hence, no invoices for these payments were generated. The milestones you set up were all refunded back to the billing method.
Here's a screen grab of a Transaction History where invoices were generated for paid milestones. As you can see, each invoice has the freelancer's name under the Freelancer column of the report. This is because a payment for the milestone was successfully processed, and an invoice was generated.

b) I see transactions such as ;

Mar 6, 2023 Payment Paid from PayPal ......

with no info on what that refers to. Why ?

As noted in this article, transactions on fixed-price contracts have more complex back-end accounting than hourly contracts because funds are being moved around in more steps. Please check the "Fixed-Price Transaction Process" section of the article to understand how these transactions are displayed on your Transaction History page. This specific transaction you mentioned above refers to the Bonus ($25.00) you issued to your freelancer and the Marketplace Fee ($1.25), which were both charged to the Paypal account associated with your Upwork account.

There simply is no useful information on the Invoice.

No Freelancer details

No Job details

Just an amount.

I believe you're referring to the PDF invoices for the refunded payments to your account. However, if you check the invoices generated for the bonuses you issued, you will see that it includes the freelancer's name. I have here some screenshots for your reference.

And why do we have to "download" the pdf to view it. Why is it not able to be simply opened in the browser like so many other sites. It is a pain having to download a file every time just to view it.

This screenshot shows some information on the invoice when clicking on a reference ID on your Transaction History. This gives some information on the invoice at a glance. But should you need to download the PDF version of the invoice, you can click on "View invoice." When you click on it, it opens in a new tab on your browser and downloads a file on your computer.

I hope this answers all your questions. Let us know if there's anything else our team can help you with.

~ Avery

c9967633 · ‎04-03-2024

I'm sure people eventually figure it out in time, but the client transaction history truly could be improved. It is a mess.

Improvements could be as simple as making the distinction between what is charged to us as the client (now termed Payment) and what is paid to freelancer (ALSO termed Payment).

There are just too many individual transactions, each with an individual invoice / receipt / credit memo. Such tedious cross-referencing "Paid from escrow for invoice xxx" / "Marketplace Fee for Ref ID yyyy" / "Paid from **** **** to escrow for funding request zzzzz"

The only logical identifiers are the Date -- so for self preservation, a client may choose to carry out each milestones and new job transactions on a different day so that charges can be a bit more clearly sorted. (And I say this as a very occasional user; I am not sure how superusers do it but I guess they have paid accountants to sort stuff out)

Surely it wouldn't kill to consolidate the breakdown of payments to freelancer and Upwork fees under 1 single job or milestone whether in the Transactions History page/csv or on PDF invoices. Take a look at Fiverr's invoices. Neat. Logical.

And downloading invoices gives us another tedious mess. Everything is named Txxxxx -- whether it's a receipt / invoice / credit memo.

For accounting, there's literally no use for an invoice from the freelancer because the payment is to Upwork.
The receipt with the total amount could literally include the invoice details for payment to which freelancer and Upwork's service fee, and everything would make sense.

Right now Upwork is just giving all of us an extract of its own backend line transactions because that's the easiest thing for it to do. I know this comes across as entitled, but I'm just pointing out basic service expectations.