Adding Payees
How to add new payees to your company
Adding a payee is the first step in getting someone into payroll. This guide covers adding employees, contractors, loan-outs, and vendors to your company in Greenroom.
Adding someone opens the payee's own record, blank. You fill in as much of it as you know — who they are, what they're engaged on, what they're paid — and click Create payee once. Nothing is written until you do.
This changed on 2026-08-13. Add payee used to be a small slide-in panel that collected a type, a name, and an email, and then dropped you onto the payee's page to do everything again. It is now a full page at Payees → New payee, showing the record itself. If you remember re-typing the same details twice, that's the thing that was fixed.
Opening the page
Go to Payees in the main navigation and click Add payee in the top right. You land on New payee, with breadcrumbs reading Payees / New payee and a note under the heading: Nothing is saved until you create the payee.
That note is literal. Rendering the page writes nothing — no draft row, no placeholder. Everything you type is held in the browser until Create payee succeeds. If you navigate away with something typed, Greenroom warns you first.
The three blocks
The page is the record, in the record's own order. It has three sections and one button.
1. Personal info (or Business info)
Name and contact only. For a loan-out or a vendor the card is titled Business info and asks for a business name, with the person's name becoming the contact's name.
| Field | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Business name | Yes, for loan-outs and vendors | Replaces first/last name for business-type payees |
| First name / Last name | Yes, for employees and contractors | Optional on a loan-out or vendor, where they identify the contact |
| Always | Send it to the person who'll actually complete the form — not a shared inbox like info@. This becomes their onboarding contact address. | |
| Phone | No |
Date of birth, tax ID, and mailing address are not collected here. The card says so: Name and contact — identity and address are collected in finish setup. Those are sensitive fields, and they're gathered in the finish-setup flow — either by you or by the payee themselves. See Payee Onboarding.
2. Engagement & union
This is where the engagement is described, and — since it is a property of the engagement — where the tax classification lives.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Union | The union governing this engagement, or none |
| Agreement | Which agreement under that union. If your company is locked to one agreement, this is shown rather than chosen. |
| Job title | From the union's own title list |
| Sub-type | Only for job titles that have one — an Actor/Musician, for example. See Actor/Musicians. |
| Department | Required for non-union payees |
| Alt job title | Optional free-text label |
| Effective start | When this engagement begins |
Tax classification
Inside the same block, under the heading Tax classification — "How this engagement is paid and reported at year end."
| Type | Select when | Tax treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Employee (W-2) | On payroll — taxes withheld | W-2 at year end |
| Loan-out | An employee paid through their corporation (e.g. an actor). Requires an EIN. | No withholding |
| Contractor (1099) | Fee-based work: directors, designers, choreographers. Paid gross. | 1099 at year end |
| Vendor | Invoices for goods and services (accounts payable) | Not automatically 1099 |
If you're not sure which to pick, click Not sure? See examples at the top right of the block. It opens a reference panel sorting common roles (actors, directors, choreographers, rehearsal studios, and more) into the right type by how you're paying them, not their job title — the same role can be a different type depending on whether they're on payroll, paid through a company, or billing you. It also explains when a vendor can be marked W-9-exempt.
Classification can't be changed later
Once the payee is created, this block stops offering the choice and simply states it: "Chosen when this payee was added — it drives their tax forms and 1099 routing." There is no change-type control anywhere. If you pick wrong, archive the record and add a new one. Verify classification before you create.
A second record is also the answer for one person who needs paying two ways — a W-2 engagement and a separate 1099 one. The saved record says as much beneath its classification: "Every engagement on this payee is paid and reported this way. To pay this person under a different tax classification, use Add payee to create a separate record." See Payee Types.
A loan-out needs one more answer: Federal tax ID — Has an EIN (a corporation or LLC with its own tax ID) or SSN only (a single-member LLC filing on a personal SSN). Picking SSN only shows the refusal inline, right beside the choice that caused it, and disables Create payee:
A single-member LLC paid on an SSN can't be a loan-out — it needs an EIN. Add them as an employee instead.
This is a classification decision, not a number capture — the actual EIN or SSN is collected later.
3. Pay
A Rates module, labelled with the engagement you just described. Choose 802 and a Music Director title and the heading says so; clear the union and it says Non-union.
Click Add rate to add a row: a rate name, an amount and period, an optional GL code, and an effective window. You can add several — the payroll run resolves whichever one is active on the pay-period date. The card's subtitle says exactly that: "Rates for this engagement — the run resolves the one active on the pay-period date."
If a union rate falls below the governing minimum, Greenroom shows a below-scale notice. It's a warning, never a block.
Two Pay controls that exist on a saved payee are deliberately not offered here: premiums and the invoice-basis toggle. Premiums are stored as separate adjustment rows the create path doesn't write, and invoice basis needs a tax ID on file that a brand-new payee can't have. Both are available the moment the payee exists.
Creating
Click Create payee. It's the only write on the page.
If something required is missing, a banner appears at the top naming what it is and offering a Go to [section] button that scrolls you there — rather than a toast that vanishes before you've read it. The two forms it takes:
- "Fix this to create: …" — something entered is invalid.
- "Still needed: …" — something required hasn't been entered.
On success, Greenroom takes you straight to the new payee's own page to continue setup.
No automatic invitation
Creating a payee does not send them anything. There's no invite-at-creation option — the account-aware setup link is sent separately, from the new payee's own page, once you're ready (immediately, or after you've filled in some of their setup yourself). See "Send it to the payee" in Payee Onboarding.
Bulk import
To add many payees at once, use Import CSV next to Add payee on the payee list. Import keeps its slide-in panel — a file upload genuinely is a modal task — where you can drag a CSV onto the drop area or click to choose one.
Import process
- Click Download template for a ready-to-fill CSV with one example row per payee type.
- Fill in your payees, following the template's columns.
- Drop the file onto the panel (or click to browse for it).
- Review the preview — it shows how many rows are ready to import and lists any errors by line number, using the same validation as the single-payee form.
- Click Import N payees. Rows with errors are skipped and reported; valid rows import even if others fail.
CSV columns
| Column | Notes |
|---|---|
type | employee, loanout, contractor, or vendor — required |
firstName, lastName | Required for employees/contractors |
businessName | Required for loan-outs/vendors |
email | Required |
phone | Optional |
addressLine1, city, state, zip | Optional |
department | Optional |
startDate | Required (YYYY-MM-DD) |
paymentMethod | direct_deposit, check, or setup_later — defaults to setup_later if blank. direct_deposit needs routing and account numbers added per-payee after import. |
hasEin | Loan-out rows only — yes/true/1 confirms the corporation has an EIN. A loan-out row without this is rejected, same as the single-payee form. |
Only type, email, and startDate are strictly required for the file to be usable at all — a missing one of those three fails the whole file with a message naming the column to add.
Imported payees always start with payment set to "set up later" and are not invited — review them and send setup links afterwards, the same way you would for a payee added one at a time. The CSV carries no union, job title, or rate columns, so imported payees need their engagement and pay filled in on their own pages.
Validation
- Must be a valid email address.
- Duplicate emails are blocked among active payees at your company — Greenroom names the existing payee and its code, and suggests opening that record or using a different address.
- An archived payee with the same email doesn't block a new one — if you're actually re-adding someone, restore their old record instead.
Required fields
The page won't create until name (or business name) and email are filled in, and — for a loan-out — until the EIN question is answered with Has an EIN. What's missing appears in the banner at the top, with a jump link to the section it belongs to.
After creating a payee
The new payee appears in your list with onboarding status Not started and a payroll-readiness indicator showing what's still missing. Nothing is emailed to them yet. From their page, you can either fill in the rest of their setup yourself or send them a link to do it — see Payee Onboarding for both paths.
Common issues
"Already uses this email"
An active payee at your company already has this email address. Open that payee instead of creating a duplicate, or double-check you have the right address for a genuinely different person.
Invalid email format
Check for typos, extra spaces, or a missing @domain.com.
Loan-out blocked — "can't be a loan-out"
A single-member LLC paid on an SSN isn't eligible to be a loan-out in Greenroom. Create payee stays disabled until you change either the classification or the tax-ID answer.
I navigated away and lost what I typed
Greenroom warns before you leave with unsaved work, but if you confirm the warning, nothing is kept. There is no draft for an uncreated payee — deliberately, since an unsaved record must never be written anywhere.
Best practices
- Send the invite to the actual person completing onboarding, not a department alias — the email you enter here becomes their setup contact.
- Double-check tax classification before creating — it can't be changed later.
- For loan-outs, confirm the EIN question with the payee before you start, so you're not blocked mid-form.
- Fill in the engagement and at least one rate while you're on the page. Both are needed for payroll readiness, and doing them here saves a second pass.
- Use Import CSV for a full cast/crew list; use Add payee for one-offs and mid-run additions.
Next steps
After creating payees, continue with Payee Onboarding to understand the onboarding process, or see Managing Payee Information for updating payee records.