Representatives & Payment Direction

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 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.

Representative payment role — Jordan Ellis

Not representedPayee is paid directly.

Representative receives commission onlyPayee is paid directly; representative receives their own separate commission payment.

Representative receives full payment on payee's behalfRepresentative is the authorized payment destination — the payee remains the tax-reporting recipient.

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. Choosing Not represented on a payee that currently has one attached detaches the representative (with a confirmation prompt) rather than just hiding the panel. The Representation section sits right after Basics and before Engagement & union — near the top of the payee record, not near the bottom — so representation is settled before you get into pay setup.

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 you can pick when attaching one:

A sixth value, Lawyer, exists only to keep older representative records (saved before "Attorney" was introduced) displaying correctly — it isn't offered when attaching a new representative.

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 Riverside Artists Group)
• 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.

How the commission itself is entered depends on the payee's union, the same way pay rates do (see Role & Pay):

• AEA payees get two flat percentage fields, Performance and Rehearsal, each resolving against its own pay line — a performance commission calculated off performance pay, a rehearsal commission off rehearsal pay. The two are never blended into a single combined rate.
• Every other union, and every non-union payee, instead gets a single row with a free-text name and one percentage (e.g., "10% Booking fee") — there's no separate Rehearsal field to leave blank, because for these payees there's only ever one commission line.

Before a commission-only arrangement is complete, the representative's own tax profile and banking details are required — the representative supplies these through their own self-service link, not entered on the payee's behalf. That link captures the representative's EIN (for Greenroom's own records) and their payment method; the signed W-9 form itself is collected by the company separately and isn't uploaded through that link. Once the representative's payment method is on file, they're paid by ACH or paper check, using a payment memo that's editable but pre-structured as client · production · payee name.

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. The one thing that has to be true before Greenroom will pay a representative by ACH under this path is that the payee's payment-direction authorization has cleared admin review (see below) — that single status is what both the on-screen ACH toggle and the run-submission fence check; there's no second, separately-tracked gate for the representative's own tax profile.

Until the authorization is admin-reviewed, paper check is the default and only available payment method, mailed using a payee-line selector that controls exactly whose name leads on the check:

Once ACH is unlocked, its payment memo is composed automatically at send time from four parts — client · production · payroll period · payee — rather than typed in by a manager, the way the commission-only memo is.

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 on a tokenized link or uploaded as a signed document, then reviewed by a Greenroom super-admin before it's active. 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.

A material change to the representative resets the authorization back to "Required." An existing authorization doesn't silently carry forward — changing the representative's bank details, EIN, commission rate, or representative type invalidates the active authorization and drafts a fresh one the payee has to grant again, rather than editing the old one in place. This is deliberately broad: it's not limited to the authorized method or the mailing/bank destination named on the authorization itself.

Completing setup

The representative's own onboarding is a separate, two-step invite sequence that lives directly inside the Representation card — it is not one of the paths on the payee's own "Complete onboarding" card (that card only offers Finish setup yourself or Send it to [payee], and covers the payee's own identity/payment/tax/documents, not the representative's).

Before the save, the panel explains why it can't act yet rather than issuing an instruction: both links are emailed to a real inbox, so they can only be created once the representative record exists. Every other field on the row — type, contact name, agency, email, EIN, address, commission, memo — saves in the same pass as the payee, and the panel comes back in place afterwards. There's no second trip.

Once a representative is attached and saved, a "Representative onboarding" panel appears with two sequential links, matching Mike Fiske's required order — the agent is never contacted before the payee has approved them:

1. Payee approval link — emailed to the payee; they review the representative's identity and fees and approve them. A manager can also approve on the payee's behalf (for a verbal approval) instead of waiting on the email.
2. Agent completion link — sent to the representative only after step 1 clears. The representative uses it to enter their own agency name, EIN, mailing address, and payment method (paper check, or direct deposit with bank details) — a one-time form, not a persistent account. The signed W-9 itself is still collected by the company separately; this link doesn't take a document upload.

Both links are tokenized, single-purpose pages rather than a login — there's no ongoing "Agent Portal" with a client list or activity log. If the payee also needs to sign a payment-direction authorization for the full-payment path, that's a third, separate tokenized link (see the authorization artifact above) — completing the representative's own onboarding doesn't imply the authorization is done too.

Related

• Role & Pay — pay rates that a representative's commission is calculated against
• Payee Onboarding — the payee's own onboarding flow, separate from the representative-invite sequence on this page