This guide walks through the redesigned payment request experience, which we've recently polished. It hasn't been released broadly yet, but we can make it available for your workspace.
Additional changes are planned, but this version should be well suited to your current process for paying out bonuses to contractors who submit payment requests: you open a request, see the amount, attached invoice, pay period, and approval history in one panel, and pay, approve, or reject it right there.
Below, we'll walk you through how it works, then discuss how it differs from the current flow and the rationale for using it for your bonus process.
1. Find your payment requests
Go to Payments → Requests. Requests are grouped into four tabs: Pending, Rejected, Withdrawn, and Completed. The Pending tab is always your to-do list.
2. Review a request
Click Review on any row to open the request's details drawer. Everything you need to make a decision is in one panel:
The amount, including the rate × hours behind it for hourly work (e.g. "48.00 EUR × 40.00 hours").
The pay period, the attached invoice, the contractor's description of the work, and any approvals so far.
The contractor's recent payments, so you can sanity-check the request against what they've been paid before.
The invoice
Click the invoice link to open the attached file in a new browser tab. The drawer stays exactly where it was, so you don't lose your place.
3. Pay, approve, or reject
These are the actions you can take on a pending request, from the buttons at the top of the drawer.
Pay
Pay [amount] is the primary (filled) button. When you use it, the payment is scheduled immediately, and a single charge is created for it. While the payment processes, the button shows "Paying…" and is disabled, so a request can't be paid twice.
A few details on how the payment runs:
You don't pick a pay date. The payment is scheduled for the next earliest pay date and paid as soon as it can be.
Allow about 4 business days of processing time (assuming you don't maintain a balance in Plane)
The resulting payment appears in the drawer right below the request. Click it to open its full detail.
You can also see all scheduled payments under Payments → Pay contractors → Scheduled.
Note: On requests that are already completed or rejected, these action buttons don't appear.
Mark as approved
Mark as approved records your approval without paying. Use this when approval and payment are separate responsibilities, or when someone else does the paying. A short confirmation makes this explicit: the request will be marked as approved but will not be paid.
Reject
Reject request declines the request. You'll be asked for a reason for rejection, which is shared with the contractor so they understand the decision.
4. After a request is scheduled for payment
Once you pay a request, it moves to the Completed tab and its payment is scheduled. The request's drawer shows a green "This payment request was completed" banner, the recorded approval, and the resulting payment, so the money movement is tied directly to the request it came from.
Click the payment to open its full detail: reference, bank account, the originating request and charge, and the payment confirmation.
5. How this differs from the previous flow
The previous flow
Previously, paying a contractor payment request was two distinct steps:
Approve the request under Payment Requests.
Separately go to Pay Contractors and pay it there.
Because approving and paying happened in different places, it was easy to lose the thread: the payment wasn't obviously tied back to the request, and there was extra navigation.
The redesigned flow
Review, approval, and payment happen in one place: the request's drawer, with the invoice and payment history in context. Fewer steps, less switching, and each payment is tied directly to its request.
Alternative: paying bonuses through payroll
Bonuses can also be paid through payroll instead of payment requests. The trade-offs:
Payroll lets you set the earning type, but you enter the amounts manually, and there's currently no way to attach supporting documentation (like the invoice) to a payroll earning.
Payroll bonuses follow the payroll processing windows for regular payroll. Off-cycle payrolls can be used too, but they take more manual input.
One payroll upside: if the worker already has other earnings in the same run, the bonus can be combined with them, which can avoid an extra per-payment bank fee imposed by intermediary banks (those fees are outside Plane's control).
On balance, payment requests are the better fit for invoice-backed bonuses: the documentation stays attached and the process is more direct.
Notes
Payments created from payment request are currently treated as regular earnings: the amount isn't split out or labeled as a bonus.
There's no tax difference from paying this way.
Reporting won't show these payments as bonuses. That's a known gap and a potential future improvement, not something we can cleanly solve in the short term.