Paying your judges

Ledger, the first tab of a season's Payouts screen, is the season's pay ledger: one row per judge, what their approved scorecards add up to, what has been paid, and what is still owed. It is also where a payment is written down — after you have made it, by bank transfer, check, PayPal, Venmo or cash. FilmScorecard moves no money: this screen records payments made outside the platform; it cannot send one.

What a judge is owed starts long before this screen. Each category carries rates (Judge pay), each invitation copies and may tune them — or declines them entirely, if that judge was taken on as a volunteer (What an invitation pays) — and each scorecard records its own price the moment it is filed. This screen is where those records are finally added up — and the first screen anywhere that shows them.

Every row also opens a pay statement: one judge's figures as a document you can print or hand over — and the same document that judge can read for themselves in their own portal. See The pay statement.

Beside it sit two more tabs: Invoices, where the invoices your judges send from their statements land — see Judge invoices — and the payments log, the season's transactions one row at a time rather than one row per judge. See The other tabs. Invoices still waiting on you are also listed on this tab, above the judges — see Invoices to pay.

Finding the screen

Payouts sits in the season block of the left navigation, between Awards and Settings, and opens on this tab. Its address is:

/org/<organization>/<festival>/<season>/payouts

The row is there only for the people allowed to see it, and for nobody else — the navigation carries on without it. It carries an amber count of the invoices waiting on you — every invoice a judge has sent that is Sent or Accepted and not yet paid — and while that count is above zero the row opens the Invoices tab instead of this one. No invoices waiting, no number, and the row opens the Ledger. See Judge invoices.

The three tabs under the heading — Ledger · Invoices · Payments — carry no counts of their own. They are one page, so switching between them is instant and nothing reloads. The address names the tab you are on — the Ledger is the bare address above, the other two add ?tab=invoices and ?tab=payments — so a reload, a bookmark or a link you send opens the same tab, and the browser's Back button leaves Payouts rather than stepping back through the tabs. The older tab addresses, …/payouts/invoices and …/payouts/payments, still work and open the tab they name. Older links to …/judges/pay, including saved statement addresses, still work too: they forward here.

Who sees it, and who can act on it

Two different questions:

• Opening the screen takes the View revenue and payouts permission — the same one that decides the Revenue card on the Season overview. Festival admins have it by default; coordinators, programmers and viewers do not; owners and org admins always do; a tick box on anybody's grant changes the answer — see Festival access. Somebody without it has no Payouts row in the navigation at all — not a greyed one — and typing the Payouts address, on any of its three tabs, sends them back to the season. The same permission governs the statements, the invoices and the receipts: they sit under the same address, and each of them answers the same people "page not found". Somebody who types a Payouts address anyway may see the section's heading appear above that refusal, but no figure under it is ever read, and none of them reach their browser.

  So the common case is a coordinator who runs the whole judging pipeline — roster, requests, invitations, the Review Queue — and never sees this ledger. The reverse case works too: somebody given View revenue and payouts and nothing else — the accountant below — gets the whole Payouts section, and the Judges screen without its tab strip.

• Logging or voiding a payment additionally requires being somebody who can change the season. A read-only viewer given View revenue and payouts — a board member, an accountant — reads every figure, every breakdown, every receipt and every statement, and finds no Log a payment, no Mark paid and no Void anywhere. The refusal is enforced when a write is attempted, not only on screen.

Where the money comes from

• A scorecard becomes payable when it is approved on the Review Queue. Filed work still waiting on a reviewer is excluded from every figure, and nothing on this screen counts it — the Review Queue is where it waits.
• Each approved scorecard contributes the amount recorded on it when it was filed — that judge's own rate at that moment, not today's. Nothing on this screen multiplies a rate by a count, so repricing a season, resetting to the library or changing a judge's next invitation never moves this ledger's history. See What a filed scorecard records.
• Scorecards a coordinator filled in themselves contribute nothing. Staff filings are not paid work and are left out of every figure and count.
• A scorecard approved with no rate on record is "unpriced". It is excluded from every figure and reported in amber instead — season-wide, above the table ("3 approved scorecards are unpriced and are excluded from every figure below"), and again on each affected judge's row. There is no way to price one after the fact yet. The ways a scorecard ends up unpriced are listed in Two ways to end up with unpriced work; a press-kit scorecard is a third — no press-kit rate exists, so an approved one in a paid season always lands in this bucket.
• A rate of $0.00 is not "unpriced". A scorecard priced at zero counts in the Scorecards column and contributes $0.00, deliberately. The ordinary way to get one is a judge who is on this season as a volunteer — see A volunteer judge on a paid season — and a season that judged as volunteer before turning paid produces them too.

The three figures

Across the top, three cards, always covering the whole season whatever the table below is filtered to:

Outstanding counts only what is positively owed. A judge you have overpaid does not quietly reduce what you still owe everybody else: their credit is kept out of the figure, and the card grows an amber footnote instead — "2 judges overpaid by $24.00 in total. Credits are not subtracted from what others are owed."

A volunteer judge's $0.00 lines are in Approved pay's scorecard count and add nothing to its money. They are priced work worth nothing, so they neither inflate a figure nor disappear from one.

These three are the season's figures, and they are the only ones that claim to be. The line above the payments log describes the rows listed on that tab, which is a different question.

Invoices to pay

While any invoice a judge has sent is still waiting on you — Sent or Accepted, not yet paid — an Invoices to pay card sits between the figures and the judges, with a count beside its heading. It lists every open invoice on the season, in the same order as the Invoices tab, one line each:

• the judge's name and the invoice's status pill;
• under it, the number, the amount and when it is due — "INV-0007 · $150.00 · due Nov 14, 2026" — or "sent Oct 15, 2026" when the invoice has no due date.

Each line carries two buttons:

• View opens the invoice itself. Accept and Return are there, not on this card — see Accepting, returning and marking paid.
• Mark paid opens the same dialog as Mark paid on the invoice: Log a payment with the invoice fixed in it — see Mark paid. It is there only for somebody who can change the season, and only when the judge has a row on this ledger, because the dialog names it. A read-only viewer finds View alone.

Once an invoice is paid it leaves the card — it is then on the Invoices tab under Paid — and the figures and the judge's row update at once. Returned and withdrawn invoices are never on it, and with nothing open the card is not there at all.

The ledger

One row per judge who ever accepted a seat this season, whatever has happened since. A judge you paused, removed or whose invitation you revoked keeps their row, with a quiet grey note beside their name — Paused, Removed from roster, Invitation revoked, Declined — because a debt does not disappear when somebody leaves the roster, and no other screen reports it. Judges who were invited and never accepted are not listed.

Volunteers are listed too, and read Nothing payable — see A volunteer judge on a paid season.

The columns: Judge (name, with their email underneath), Scorecards (their approved, priced ones — the count that matches the money), Approved pay, Paid, Outstanding, Pay state, and a ⋮ menu. A judge with unpriced work carries an amber "2 unpriced scorecards excluded" under their name.

No column says whether a judge is a volunteer. $0.00 in Approved pay beside a non-zero Scorecards count is what it looks like; their panel's Pricing tab on the Roster is where it is stated in words.

On a narrow window the table scrolls sideways under a frozen header, with the Judge column holding still on the left — rows never restack.

The five pay states

(The judge reads the same five words for the same facts, on the Statements tab of their own Earnings screen — except a volunteer, who has no statement at all and reads their place on that screen's Volunteer tab instead.)

A volunteer judge on a paid season

A season that pays its judges can hold one who was taken on as a volunteer — by invitation, or by applying to one of its open calls as one. On this ledger they are an ordinary row, and every figure about them is honest:

• Their approved scorecards are priced at $0.00, one line each in the breakdown, grouped by category like anybody else's. $0.00 is a price here, not an absence.
• They are never in the amber unpriced bucket. That bucket means "a paid judge whose rate was never set" and is a thing to fix; a volunteer's zero is a decision, and the two must not be confused.
• Their row reads Nothing payable, their Approved pay is $0.00, and their ⋮ menu offers no Log a payment — there is nothing to pay.
• Open pay breakdown and Open statement both still work, and both are all-zeros documents. The judge cannot open that statement themselves — see What the judge sees, and when.
• Nothing on this screen says "volunteer" in words. The Roster's Pricing tab does.

A season where every judge is a volunteer still shows the ledger, as long as the season's own setting is Paid — a table of $0.00 rows rather than the notice below. The notice belongs to the season's setting, not to who is on it.

The ⋮ menu

It is built from the row's state rather than being a fixed list with greyed-out entries, so what you see is what will work:

Sorting, searching and filtering

• The table opens on Outstanding, largest first, with names A→Z breaking ties — the judges you still owe sit at the top, and the settled rows sink to the bottom in name order. Volunteers therefore sit at the bottom, among the settled ones.
• Every column heading sorts. The money columns and Scorecards open largest-first; Judge opens A→Z; clicking the same heading again reverses it.
• Search matches names and emails. Pay state filters the rows, several states at once, each with its count over the whole ledger; on a narrow window the filter sits behind a single Filters button. Clear filters puts everything back. Filtering to Nothing payable is the nearest thing to a volunteer filter, though it also catches judges who have simply filed nothing yet.
• Sorting and filtering are yours alone and reset when the page reloads. The three figure cards ignore them entirely.

When a filter matches nobody, the table says so — "No judges match these filters", with the roster count and a Clear filters button. A season where nobody has accepted a seat yet reads "Nobody has accepted a seat this season" instead of an empty table.

The pay breakdown

Click a judge's name, or choose Open pay breakdown from their ⋮ menu, and a panel opens over the ledger showing how their numbers were reached. The address changes as it opens, so you can send a colleague a link that lands directly on one judge's breakdown.

• Their own three figures — Approved pay, Paid, Outstanding — with an overpaid judge's Outstanding reading their credit in amber.
• The approved work, one line per rate rather than one per film: Category · Rate type · Rate · Cards · Amount — "Documentary Feature · Creative · $16.00 · 3 · $48.00". Technical and creative work are always separate lines, never blended. A scorecard with no category on record is listed by its type alone — "Technical scorecard" — and still counts in full. Unpriced scorecards get their own amber line reading Unpriced, with a dash where the amount would be. With no approved scorecards yet, the table reads "No approved scorecards yet this season." A volunteer judge's lines read $0.00 and $0.00 — an ordinary priced line, not the amber unpriced one.
• Payments, newest first: the amount, the method and reference, the date paid, any note, which scorecards it covered when a set was picked, who logged it, and a View receipt link when one was attached. With none, "Nothing paid yet this season."

This is the only place a payment's note and its covered films are shown. The payments log reports how many scorecards a payment covered, never which, and never the note.

A View statement button sits in the panel's header, on every judge, and opens that judge's statement.

A voided payment stays in the list struck through, on a grey card, with an amber note underneath — "Voided by Ada Chen — logged against the wrong judge" — and its receipt link still works. See Voiding a payment.

Escape, the ✕, a click on the background or the browser's Back button all close the panel.

The pay statement

Open statement on a row's ⋮ menu, or View statement in the breakdown panel, opens one judge's figures as a document:

/org/<organization>/<festival>/<season>/payouts/<judge>/statement

It is a full page rather than a panel, so it has its own address to send to a colleague, and the browser's Back button (or the Ledger tab) is how you return to the ledger. The statement deliberately drops the Payouts heading and the tab strip — it is a document meant to be printed, and neither belongs on the paper.

It is offered on every row, whatever the state. A Nothing payable row opens an honest all-zeros document rather than nothing at all, a judge you removed still has one — it is the durable account of what they were owed, on a season their own portal no longer shows them — and so does a volunteer, whose copy is all zeros by design.

What it holds

Balance due never goes negative. An overpaid judge's statement reads $0.00 with a second line under it — "$12.00 paid above the approved total."

Where it deliberately differs from the breakdown

The statement is what the judge sees, so two things in the drawer are not on it, on your copy as much as theirs:

• Voided payments are not on it at all — not struck through, not greyed: absent, along with the reason and the name of whoever voided them. The audit trail stays in the breakdown and on the payments log, where it belongs.
• No receipts, no notes, and no "logged by". Who recorded a payment and what they attached is internal.

And one thing is on it that the drawer does not have: film titles. The Approved work table still groups by category and rate, but the Scorecards page after it names every approved film, one line each — so the judge can see exactly which pieces of work the total is made of. Both copies print the same lines.

Everything else is the same figure read from the same record: your copy and the judge's cannot disagree.

Printing it

Download PDF, above the document, opens your browser's own print dialogue — choose Save as PDF for a file, or a printer for paper. No file is generated on the server and none is stored. The navigation, the top bar and the button itself are all left out of what prints, the approved-work table prints every line rather than the few that fit on screen, and the Scorecards list starts on a page of its own after the summary.

What the judge sees, and when

Judges reach their own copy through the Earnings row in their portal — its Statements tab lists every paid place they hold, one View statement each. Your pay statement is the judge's-eye guide to the document; Earnings is the guide to the screen around it, where your season's figures sit beside every other festival's.

The judge's copy has one control yours does not: Send invoice, beside Download PDF. It sends you their statement, frozen, as a numbered invoice — it arrives on the Invoices tab. See Judge invoices.

Nothing tells the judge a statement changed. No email, no inbox notice: it is a page they open, not a message you send. If you have just voided a payment or approved a batch of their work, the change is silent until their next look — though it is no longer unexplained on their side: their Earnings screen lists a voided payment struck through with the date you voided it (never your reason), and counts freshly approved work. A large change is still worth a message. The exception is a payment that pays one of their invoices: they are emailed the amount and the date paid.

Logging a payment

Log a payment is on a row's ⋮ menu and at the top of the breakdown's Payments list. It is only on this tab, and as Mark paid on an invoice and on its line under Invoices to pay — the payments log records what has been paid and never adds to it, because a payment starts with choosing a judge and seeing what they are owed.

It is not offered on a Nothing payable row — there is nothing to pay, which is also why it is never offered on a volunteer — and it is offered on a fully-paid row, because overpaying is allowed and warned about, not blocked.

The dialog opens with the point stated plainly: "This records a payment you already made outside FilmScorecard. No money moves." Under it, the Judge the payment is for.

If that judge has an open invoice, a Pays INV-0007 switch comes next, on when the dialog opens: leave it on and this payment pays that invoice, which then reads Paid and the judge is emailed; switch it off for a payment that has nothing to do with it. Paying an invoice from the invoice itself, or from its line under Invoices to pay, is Mark paid — the same dialog with the invoice fixed in it. See Mark paid.

1. Amount arrives pre-filled with the judge's outstanding balance, in dollars. Change it freely. An amount above the balance is accepted with an amber warning — "This is above the $150.00 outstanding. The excess is recorded as an overpayment."

2. Date paid starts at today and cannot be in the future — this is a record of a payment already made. It is the date both this ledger and the payments log order by.

3. Method is one of four: Bank transfer, Check, PayPal or Venmo, Cash. The reference field underneath follows your choice:

   Method	The reference field
   Bank transfer	Transfer reference — e.g. ACH 88-4419
   Check	Check number — e.g. 2215
   PayPal or Venmo	Transaction ID — e.g. PP-XXXXXX
   Cash	Reference — e.g. Receipt book 14

   The reference is optional, up to 200 characters. It is printed on the judge's statement, it names the payment's row on their Earnings screen, and it is one of the two things the payments log's search matches, so write something you and they would both recognise.

4. Logged by is you, stated and not editable — every payment names the person who recorded it, on the breakdown and in the payments log. That name is not on the statement.

5. Receipt is optional: one PNG, JPEG or PDF, up to 10MB. It opens later from View receipt on the payment, on this tab and on the payments log, and is never shown to the judge.

6. Note is optional, up to 2,000 characters, and stays internal to this tab's breakdown.

7. What this payment covers is either All outstanding or Picked scorecards. Picking opens the judge's priced, approved scorecards, each with its recorded rate; ticking them rewrites the amount to their sum, and you can still edit the amount afterwards — the amount is what you paid, the picked set is what the payment was for. The set is kept on the payment and shown in the breakdown as "Covers …", on the payments log as a count, and on the judge's statement as "covers 3 scorecards" without naming them. It is a note of intent, nothing more: outstanding is always approved pay minus payments, never worked out from which scorecards were named.

8. Press Log a payment. Problems appear under each field and summarised at the top, and the dialog stays open; success closes it, shows "Payment logged.", and the figures and the row update at once.

Overpayments and credits

Paying more than the balance is legitimate — an advance before the last approvals land, a rounded-up transfer — so FilmScorecard records it rather than refusing it. The row reads Overpaid with the credit on its Outstanding cell, the breakdown shows the credit in amber, the judge's statement reads "$12.00 paid above the approved total.", and the season's Outstanding card footnotes it without subtracting it from what others are owed. A credit resolves itself as more of that judge's work is approved.

The same state has a second cause worth knowing: a scorecard voided after you paid for it takes its amount back out of approved pay, and a judge who was Paid can become Overpaid without any new payment being logged.

A volunteer cannot become Overpaid through this screen, because the one control that could — Log a payment — is not offered on their row.

Voiding a payment

A logged payment is never edited and never deleted. The one correction is a void, and it is one-way:

1. Open the judge's pay breakdown and choose Void this payment on the payment — or find the payment on the payments log and press Void at the end of its row. Both open the same dialog and do the same thing.
2. The dialog states the consequence: the payment stops counting toward Paid and comes back into Outstanding; the record stays, struck through, with your name and your reason; its receipt stays attached; and a void cannot be undone — log a new payment instead.
3. A reason is required. Press Void payment.

Voiding takes the same permission as logging. The voided record remains in the breakdown and on the payments log permanently — history here is corrected, never rewritten — and if somebody else voided the same payment first, you are told "This payment is already voided." and nothing changes twice.

On the judge's statement the payment simply vanishes, and their balance goes back up. On their Earnings screen's Payments tab it stays listed, struck through with the date you voided it — but never your reason, which stays on your side. Voiding a payment a judge may already have seen is still worth a message to them.

Voiding a payment that paid an invoice puts that invoice back to Accepted, waiting to be paid again. See Judge invoices.

The other tabs

Invoices, the middle tab, lists every invoice your judges have sent this season, open ones first, each opening as the frozen document with Accept, Return and Mark paid. The open ones are on this tab too, under Invoices to pay. See Judge invoices.

Payments, the last tab, is the same money read the other way round: one row per payment for the whole season, newest first, with the method, the reference, who logged it and its receipt — and a search and two filters over the lot. It is where "what did we pay out in March" is answered, and where a payment is easiest to find when you know the check number and not the judge.

Everything it shows is on this tab too, one judge at a time, in the breakdown. See The payments log.

Volunteer seasons

A season whose own judge pay setting is Volunteer shows no ledger at all — no figures, no rows, no payment actions. In their place is a notice: "This season is volunteer. No scorecard on it carries a payout, so this judge is owed nothing per card filed."

That notice is keyed on the season, and it is the one judge-facing place the season's own setting still decides something on its own. It is safe to be that blunt because a volunteer season can only hold volunteer places — the setting is a ceiling, so nothing paid can exist under it and there is provably nothing to owe.

With no rows there is nothing to open a statement from, and judges on a volunteer season have no statement in their portal either. They do have an Earnings row: the place is listed on that screen's Volunteer tab, as filed and approved counts with "Volunteer, no pay" beside them and no money anywhere — see Earnings. The payments log is not blanked in the same way: if the season holds payments, that tab still lists them.

A paid season with volunteers on it is the opposite case, and it shows the full ledger — see A volunteer judge on a paid season. The notice is about the season's setting; a place's own terms are read row by row.

A season switched from volunteer to paid later shows the full ledger, with the scorecards filed during its volunteer stretch counting as real $0.00 lines — priced at nothing, not unpriced. Judges who were already on it stay volunteers — flipping the season never gives anybody a raise they did not agree to — so their later work is $0.00 too until they are re-invited on paid terms. The switch itself, and why the reverse is often locked, is on the Categories tab — see Judge pay.

What this screen does not do

• Move money. No transfer, no Stripe anything. Every payment here happened somewhere else first — including one that pays an invoice.
• Send or export statements. A statement is opened and printed one judge at a time. There is no "email this statement", no bulk download, no zip, and no CSV export of the ledger or of the payments log.
• Pay several judges at once. There is no selection and no bulk action — one payment, one judge, one dialog.
• Edit or delete a payment. Void is the only correction, permanently.
• Price unpriced scorecards. They are reported, not fixed.
• Turn a volunteer into a paid judge, or pay one for work already filed. Their place's terms are fixed and their filed scorecards keep the $0.00 they recorded. A fresh invitation on paid terms changes what happens next and nothing that has happened.
• Say who is a volunteer, in words. No column, no filter, no badge — the Roster's Pricing tab is where that is written down.
• Notify anybody — with one exception. Logging a payment, voiding one and approving work all happen silently as far as the judge is concerned — their Earnings screen and statement change, and nothing tells them so. A payment that pays one of their invoices is the exception: they are emailed the amount and the date.
• Reach past this season. Payouts belongs to the season in the address; there is no festival-wide or all-seasons roll-up of what you have paid. (The judge's own Earnings screen does add their places together — but only theirs, and only for them.)

Messages

Related guides

• Judge invoices — the Invoices tab: what your judges send you, your payment terms, and accepting, returning or marking one paid.
• The payments log — the last tab: every payment in the season as its own row, the columns, the filters, and voiding from there.
• Your pay statement — the judge's side of the statement: how they reach it, what they can and cannot see, and what they are told when something changes.
• Earnings — the judge's own screen around it: your season's figures beside every other festival's, the Volunteer tab, and the one judge-facing place a voided payment still shows.
• Judge pay — where the rates start: pricing a season's categories, the Paid or Volunteer ceiling, and what a filed scorecard records.
• What an invitation pays — the terms a particular judge holds, which are what their scorecards recorded, including the ones that carry no pay at all.
• Review Queue — approving a scorecard is what makes it payable here, and what puts it on the judge's statement.
• Festival access — the View revenue and payouts permission, role by role.
• The Season overview — the dashboard's Revenue card, and why its judge-compensation figure is not this ledger.
• Judges — the roster the ledger's rows come from, and the Pricing card that says which of them are volunteers.