I can deal with pretty much any payment system, as long as it's predictable and reasonable.

I wasn't thrilled with PhotoDune's payment system which seemed to be the worst of both worlds - you have to request a payment, unlike SS or 123rf, but when you do, you have to wait until the 15th of the following month to collect your cash.

Imagine my delight to discover today, following a painfully slow exchange of e-mails with support, that when they say "the end of the month", making a request on November 30th - according to their clock in Melbourne - isn't soon enough to qualify.

"We manage our affairs according to time at our headquarters (AEST), which is based in Melbourne, Australia. Withdrawals are processed on the last day of each month, which was November 30th, and on that same day (but after the withdrawals were processed) we also made those deposits for the bundle warnings to the authors."


I had two sales on November 30th after the bundle deposit that he refers to, so I assume they wouldn't count either for the payment to be made December 15th. (I think he means bundle earnings, not bundle warnings).

With SS it's so simple. What you earn up until midnight their time (Eastern Standard) is paid out a week or so later. No rubbish about processing payments on the last day of the month so you don't get that money for another month.

The bundle sales ran from November 13th to 20th, so processing them before the end of the month should have been no problem.

I post this so anyone else who thinks that they can make a request to be paid on the last day of the month won't be fooled as I was by this insane definition of the "end of the month".

And Merry Christmas to me from Envato...

Its a culture thing! America is a fast paced culture. Need it now not tomorrow, with a "can do" attitude. Australians are way more relaxed, even a little lazy, and typically prefer the pub, beach or BBQ to an office.

These guys just delight in making you jump through hoops.  Earlier this year I closed my account at PD.  They refused to pay me the $12 balance - said I had to wait a year before I could request it.  That's right, a year.    I entered an event in my calendar and you can be d@mn sure they'll get an email from me on that date.  And I'll post their response here.

Quote from: Reef on December 09, 2012, 18:13

Its a culture thing! America is a fast paced culture. Need it now not tomorrow, with a "can do" attitude. Australians are way more relaxed, even a little lazy, and typically prefer the pub, beach or BBQ to an office.

You'll get yourself into trouble with statements like that....

The question is which part will get me into trouble?  

Quote from: Reef on December 09, 2012, 18:13

Its a culture thing! America is a fast paced culture. Need it now not tomorrow, with a "can do" attitude. Australians are way more relaxed, even a little lazy, and typically prefer the pub, beach or BBQ to an office.

Quote from: jsnover on December 09, 2012, 18:45

Well wouldn't we all prefer the beach to the office?!

Well, I prefer the pub to the office, and I prefer the office to the beach and bbq, but I am neither Australian nor American - so this could actually make a good nonsense poll, with a lot of choices.

YEAH!  give me an old Cornish pirate pub anytime, open log fire, big fat pints of lager, the smell of tar and mahogany. the distant sound of a ships bell, the old cobbled streets.
Ahhh, who * wants to sit here doing micro.

You may have a point linguistically but legal agreements do very poorly with ambiguous language. The concept of the reasonable man is used sometimes in trying to untangle such confusion. It wouldn't be hard to make a case that as they have stats pages that switch from one month to the next at midnight on the final day, that's the meaning they should use consistently

So I just reopened the support ticket with the following. I'll post here with any answer I get.

"I just went to set up a cash out for the end of December - and unless you've just changed the text there, I assume I saw the same thing for November when I tried to cash out last time:

All earnings available at 31 Dec 2012 23:59:59

So the cutoff is not some time earlier on the last day of the month as you said, and apparently your finance people practice, but the last second of the last day of the month. By that definition you should have processed my earnings for November for payment on December 15th.

It is less the money itself than utter frustration at the many ways agencies try to drag out paying artists. You've already long since had money from the customer and are making money on the float.

What I want you do to is get management involved to get the text on the site fixed to reflect what you're actually doing - or do do what the text on the site currently says you're going to do and pay out the balance that's in the account at the very end of the month.

Doesn't seem like a lot to ask."

If Envato had been so kind as to follow your schedule with crediting to me the earnings from the bundle, that might have been a great idea.

But they say it takes 10 days to figure out how much to pay me  (bundle sales were Nov 13-20) and then credit the earnings to me conveniently after the cutoff for the month...