Setting Up Photographer Payouts
How photographer payouts work in Spatiko — set what each team member earns per service or package, how travel fees and tips pay out, and when they lock in.
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Payouts let you run commission-style pay with your crew — a flat dollar amount each member earns per service or package they shoot, tracked automatically as orders move through your workflow. This isn’t a bank transfer or payroll feature; Spatiko tracks and reports what each person earns, and you handle the actual payment yourself.
Setting a member’s rate
Rates are configured per team member, per service or package, on the Team Capabilities tab under Settings > Services. For each member, you toggle which services and packages they can be assigned to, and set a payout amount alongside each one.
A member with no capability row for a service or package simply doesn’t earn a payout on it. Note that having zero configured capabilities at all makes a member eligible for every service by default; adding even one capability restricts them to only their assigned services. See assigning shoots for how that affects who can be booked.
Payout rates are always a flat amount, not a percentage of the sale price. If a service or package is priced by tiers — by square footage or by named variations — you set one payout amount per tier, matching the number of pricing tiers. You can leave a tier blank if it shouldn’t pay out at all.
Editing rates requires catalog-management permission and is only available on paid plans — see roles and permissions and pricing.
How payouts resolve on an order
Each line item’s payout follows the photographer assigned to the session it belongs to, using that member’s configured rate for that service or package.
Travel and tips follow their own rules. Travel is billed per trip — every session carries its own travel fee, priced from its assigned photographer — and each trip’s fee pays out to the photographer who drove it. On an order where different members shoot different sessions, each earns the travel for their own visits. The one exception is an order whose travel fee you’ve pinned by hand (or that came in through an import): that single amount pays out to the photographer on the earliest assigned session instead of accruing per trip. How each trip’s fee is priced lives in travel time & travel fees.
Tips always pay out 100% to the photographer assigned to the order’s earliest session — they’re never split.
Custom line items and cancellation items always resolve to the assigned photographer, at a $0 payout rate.
Payouts recompute automatically whenever something that affects them changes — items, session assignment, the travel fee, a recorded payment, or the delivery itself — so you don’t need to manually refresh anything.
When a payout locks in
Amounts are recorded on the order as each line resolves, so editing or deleting a service in your catalog later can’t retroactively zero out a payout that already landed. What’s recorded isn’t frozen in time, though — any of the changes above re-derives that order’s payouts from each member’s current configured rate, and delivery is one of those triggers.
That means changing a member’s rate doesn’t sweep through existing orders on its own. An order nobody touches again keeps the amount it last resolved to. Touch it afterwards — reassign a session, edit an item, record a payment, deliver it — and it recomputes at your current rates.
An owner or admin can also hand-edit a specific order’s resolved payout — per item, travel, or the delivery date itself — directly on that order. Keep in mind a later change that triggers a recompute, like reassigning the photographer, will overwrite a manual edit.
Viewing earnings
- Owners and admins get a business-wide payout report for any date range, broken down per member and per service, based on each order’s delivered date — see team performance and payouts analytics for where accrued payouts show up.
- Any team member can see their own earnings — items, travel, tips, and total — for a date range, without needing extra permissions.
- On an individual order, the Payouts tab shows the live breakdown of who earns what, including whether each line is resolved, unresolved, or unassigned.
For the delivery step that triggers a recompute, see sending a delivery.
Go deeper
- Team performance & payout reports — the reporting side, where accrued payouts are totalled per member and exported for a period.
- Assigning shoots to your team — the per-session assignment that decides whose rate each line item uses.
- Services & pricing models — the catalog and pricing tiers your payout amounts hang off.
- Packages — how bundles are priced before you set a payout on one.
- Sending a delivery — one of the steps that recomputes payout amounts on the order.
Frequently asked questions
How do I set what each photographer earns per shoot?
Rates are configured per team member, per service or package, on the Team Capabilities tab under Settings > Services. Payout rates are always a flat dollar amount, not a percentage of the sale price, with one payout amount per tier on tiered services.
Do travel fees and tips pay out to photographers?
Yes. Travel is billed per trip and each trip's fee pays out to the photographer assigned to that session, so on multi-photographer orders each member earns the travel for their own visits — unless you've pinned the order's travel fee by hand, in which case that amount goes to the earliest session's photographer. Tips always pay out 100% to the earliest session's photographer and are never split.
When do payout amounts lock in?
Amounts are recorded on the order as they resolve, but they're re-derived from each member's current configured rate whenever something payout-affecting changes on that order — including delivery itself. Changing a rate doesn't rewrite past orders on its own, so an order nobody touches again keeps the amount it last resolved to. Any later change to that order recomputes it at your current rates, which can also overwrite a manual edit.
Does Spatiko transfer the money to my team?
No — payouts aren't a bank transfer or payroll feature. Spatiko tracks and reports what each person earns as orders move through your workflow, and you handle the actual payment yourself.