How to Automate Payments and Invoices to the Board Freelancers

Question

For my business right now I have the freelancers on my board sending me invoices every two weeks, however, there is always problems either they are not sending them on time or they are incorrectly doing them.

I am looking for a way to take their actions on the board, over a two week period, and then autogenerating and auto sending invoices to them based on those actions (applying labels to cards). So the whole thing is automated from end to end every two weeks.

They get paid on a per job basis, not hourly. I have them apply the label to the card when they are done the task. ie the thumbnail designer will apply the 'thumbnail' label to that card and I know their task is complete.  So I want to take all those thumbnail labels they applied over a two week basis and then form a line-by-line invoice with it. It would be $X by Y amount of gigs they did on the invoice, with total calculated and all that.

So far I haven't been able to find a solution that is automated enough for my liking.

Any suggestions from someone who has solved this?

milynnus · Answer

@Evan

If you are doing it at add label action, the integration would be a lot easier. Tools like Zapier, make or pipedream would be able to handle it.

Evan_5ahp8r · Answer

hi thanks for the reply milynnus

I'm looking into Pipedream

they say their Trello API for labels is instant. Also they say they can connect to wise.com payments, which would be awesome because that is the payment gateway i pay all my staff with.  Ultimately my dream would be to have a 'One-Click solution" that automatically calculates total jobs, sends invoices, and sends the payment sets to wise, where I just log in and click the approve button to batch pay at once.

re; the info needed for invoices....  All I need from the card for the invoice is

the name of the card, where I use a letter/number serial system.  then it would multiply against a fixed figure they get paid for job, ie $20.  then calculate total at bottom.  the exception would be the voice over guy who gets paid per word, so that would the word count multiplied by the fixed dollar amount per word.  in that case im also wondering how best to plug that info in.

milynnus · Answer

@Evan

We chatted a bit on your requirements.

Since trello keeps tracks of the actions like adding a label, you will have to do a read back of these actions using code. You will have to handle deletions/updates as well. The added complexity will be that you have to inspect the actions of every card on the board.

A better option is to webhooks you will be able to create a log of updates in a separate database (like a NOSQL db) and process them via some cron job. You will have to collect enough information to allow you get all invoice items for your freelancer, details about the project/job, .....and also some lookup tables to price the work, freelancer data to email invoice to them etc.