Representatives & Payment Direction
Setting up agents, managers, and other representatives — commission tracking and payment-direction authorization
A payee can be represented by an agent, manager, business manager, attorney, or other representative. How that representative is paid — and whether Greenroom moves any of the payee's own money to them — is controlled by a single setting on the payee record: representation. This page covers the three representation states, how a representative is set up, the commission-only path, the full payment-direction path, and the authorization that governs it.
The governing rule
A representative can prepare a payee's tax and startwork information — filling out forms, entering their own details, getting things ready. Only the payee's own authorization unlocks money moving to the representative. A representative filling out forms, however completely, never substitutes for the payee's own sign-off. Greenroom itself never takes custody of anyone's money — it only passes payment instructions downstream — so the payee's authorization is the record that backs any redirect of their pay.
What this page describes
This page documents the Representative & Payment Direction module as specified in TCG-2028 (GR-006) — the rebuild of the Representatives section, and a launch-blocking build item due 2026-07-13. If what you see on a payee's record today is simpler than what's described below (no three-state selector, no payment-direction authorization step), the rebuild is still rolling out. Today's Representatives section already supports more than a flat commission field — a linked rep entity with an agency name, mailing address, and tax ID, plus a payee-approves-first invitation sequence — but it doesn't yet have the full-payment-direction path or the authorization gate this page describes. Treat this page as the model Greenroom is building to, and check with your Greenroom contact if the screen in front of you doesn't match.
The three representation states
Every payee has exactly one representation setting active at a time:
- Not represented — the default. No representative is attached, and nothing else on this page applies. The representation panel collapses to a single line so payees without a representative (most of them) don't see empty representative fields.
- Commission only — a representative is attached and is paid a commission, deducted from the payee's own pay. The payee still receives and is responsible for the rest of their own compensation directly. See Commission-only path.
- Full payment on payee's behalf — the payee has authorized some or all of their own payment to be redirected to the representative — for example, a check made out to the payee "in care of" their agency. This is the state that requires the payment-direction authorization described below. See Full payment-direction path.
Switching between states isn't just a label change: it swaps which panel is shown on the payee record and recomputes the payee's pay summary, since "commission deducted from the payee's pay" and "payee's pay redirected to the representative" are different money movements. The representation setting sits right after the payee's own business and identity information and before their pay setup — so representation is settled before you get into rates.
Setting up a representative
A representative is a distinct entity, linked to the payee record but never merged into the payee's own identity. This matters in practice: the same agent or business manager may represent several payees on the same production, and a representative's own tax and banking details belong to them, not to the payee they represent.
Greenroom recognizes five representative types:
| Type | Typical use |
|---|---|
| Agent | Books work, negotiates contracts, usually paid a performance/rehearsal commission |
| Manager | Manages the payee's career and business affairs |
| Business manager | Handles the payee's finances and business administration |
| Attorney | Reviews or negotiates contracts on the payee's behalf |
| Other | Any representative that doesn't fit the categories above |
An attorney representative follows the same governing rule as any other type: they may prepare the payee's paperwork, but that alone never authorizes a payment redirect. There's no special "counsel" carve-out in the authorization gate.
When you add a representative, you capture:
- Contact name and email — the person you deal with day to day
- Agency or firm legal name — the business entity, kept distinct from the contact person (an agent's contact might be Maya Calloway, but the agency is the Gersh Agency)
- Tax ID / EIN — the representative's own tax identifier, captured directly or by the representative themselves when they complete their own details
- Mailing address — where a paper check is sent if that's the representative's payment method
Commission-only path
Commission-only is the arrangement most representatives use: the representative earns a percentage of what the payee earns, and that percentage is deducted from the payee's own pay rather than routed around it.
Two flat percentage fields cover this — Performance and Rehearsal. Each resolves against its own pay line: a performance commission is calculated off performance pay, a rehearsal commission off rehearsal pay. The two are never blended into a single combined rate, and if a payee has more than one representative, each representative's commission is calculated separately rather than aggregated into one number.
Before a commission-only arrangement is complete, the representative's own tax profile (W-9) and their banking details are required — this is the representative's own information, supplied through their own link, not entered on the payee's behalf. Once that's on file, the representative can be paid by ACH or paper check, using an editable payment memo (prefilled with the client, production, and payee names, and editable from there).
Full payment-direction path
Full payment direction is a different, stricter arrangement: instead of a commission deducted from the payee's pay, some or all of the payee's own payment is redirected to the representative. Because this moves the payee's own money rather than a separate fee, it's gated more tightly than commission.
The Tax ID / EIN, if applicable field on this path is deliberately worded to avoid promising a blanket answer about reportability — whether the payment is reportable to the representative depends on the specific arrangement (see tax treatment below). If a representative also has commission percentages on file, they're shown here for reference only and never affect the calculated full-payment amount.
The payment-direction authorization gate is keyed to the payee's own authorization — never to the representative's data entry. A representative can complete every field in their own profile and it still won't unlock a payment redirect on its own. Two separate things have to both be true before Greenroom will pay a representative by ACH under this path:
- The payee's payment-direction authorization is complete (see below).
- The representative's own tax profile is verified.
These are tracked as two separate checks, not one combined status — so if ACH is still locked, you can tell whether it's waiting on the payee's authorization, the representative's own verification, or both. Until both clear, paper check is the default payment method, mailed using a payee-line selector that controls exactly whose name leads on the check:
| Payee-line option | What's printed |
|---|---|
| Worker c/o Agency | The payee's own name, care of the agency — mailed to the agency's address |
| Agency c/o Worker | The agency's name, care of the payee |
| Agency c/o Loan-Out | The agency's name, care of the payee's loan-out company |
Tax treatment: payee vs. representative
Full payment direction changes where money goes, not whose income it is. The representative is the payment destination, not the income recipient — the payee remains the party the income is reported against, even when the check itself is mailed to the representative. Don't read "full payment direction" as reassigning income to the representative; it doesn't.
The authorization artifact
The payee's authorization for full payment direction isn't a checkbox — it's a captured artifact, either e-signed or uploaded as a signed document with admin review. It records:
- The payee's legal name and payee type
- The representative's legal name and representative type
- The production it applies to
- An effective date
- The specific payment method(s) it authorizes
- A revocation rule
Revoking an authorization applies to future payments only, after notice — it doesn't claw back or invalidate payments already made while the authorization was in effect.
Changing the authorized method or the payment destination resets the authorization back to "Required." An existing authorization doesn't silently carry forward onto a new method or a new destination — if a payee's authorization was for a paper check to the agency and the arrangement changes to ACH, or the destination changes, that's treated as a new authorization the payee has to grant again, not an edit to the old one.
Completing setup
For a payee with a representative attached, the "Complete onboarding" step on the payee record offers up to three paths, and which ones apply depends on whether a representative is attached and what needs the payee's own signature:
| Path | What happens | When it applies |
|---|---|---|
| Production completes & uploads | Production staff enter the payee's information directly and upload signed paper documents on their behalf | Always available |
| Invite payee | The payee logs into their own Greenroom account (or creates one) to complete their information and e-sign | Whenever the payee will sign electronically |
| Invite representative | The representative is sent to their own portal to complete the pieces that are theirs to prepare | Only appears once a representative is attached |
Whether a document is prepared by staff, the payee, or the representative, who signs it is gated by account, not by who filled it out. The payee signs their own W-4, W-9, I-9 Section 1, e-signature consent, payment-direction authorization, and deal documents — through their own login if they have a Greenroom account, or through an out-of-band paper/upload packet if they don't. I-9 Section 2 always stays with the production's general manager or production staff; it's never delegated to the payee or to a representative.
When a representative is invited, they land in their own Agent Portal — a client list, a per-client startwork checklist, their payments (gated by the same authorization rule described above), their own agency W-9 and documents, and an activity log. It's the representative's equivalent of the payee's own onboarding portal, scoped to the pieces that are theirs to handle.
Related
- Role & Pay — pay rates that a representative's commission is calculated against
- Payee Onboarding — how the representative-invite path fits into the broader onboarding flow