Brand deals: from DM to deposited.
A brand deal isn't income when they say yes. It's income when the wire clears — and between those two moments sit a contract, a deliverable, an invoice, a finance department, and several opportunities to quietly lose money. Here's the whole pipeline, stage by stage.
Treat every deal as a thing that moves through five states: draft → signed → delivered → invoiced → paid. The reason to be rigid about this isn’t process for its own sake — it’s that each transition is where a specific, predictable failure lives, and knowing which stage a deal is in tells you exactly what can still go wrong with it. It’s also how Post’s deal pipeline (on Pro) models your sponsorships, so this article doubles as the manual.
Draft: the money is decided here
By the time you sign, the economics are locked — so the negotiation stage is where you get paid or don’t. Three things belong in every draft review. Usage rights: a deliverable the brand can run as paid ads, whitelist, or repurpose for a year is worth multiples of an organic post; price the rights separately or don’t grant them. Exclusivity: a category lockout is you turning down future revenue — it has a price. Payment terms: net-30, net-45, and net-60 decide when you eat. Shorter terms, a deposit up front on bigger projects, or both. None of this is aggressive; it’s what the brand’s own vendors already do.
Signed: get the countersigned copy
A deal is signed when both parties have signed, and you possess the proof. Chase the countersigned PDF before you produce anything — a shocking number of payment disputes begin with “we never finalized that agreement.” File it where the deal lives, not in an email thread you’ll grep for in November. (Upload the contract to Post and it pre-fills the deal — amount, deliverables, dates — so the paper and the pipeline are the same object.)
Delivered: timestamp everything
Delivery is when your leverage peaks — the work exists, theirs is the only side left to perform. Protect it with timestamps: the live URL, the sent draft, the approval email. If the contract has an approval window (“brand has five business days to request revisions”), the clock only helps you if you can prove when it started. Deals drift here for innocent reasons too — a marketing contact leaves, the campaign gets rescheduled — and an innocently drifting deal and an unpaid one look identical from your bank account.
Invoiced: same day, correct details, then follow up like a business
Invoice the day you deliver. Not because a day matters, but because net-45 starts from the invoice date — every week you delay invoicing is a week you gave away interest-free. The invoice needs the boring things right: the entity name from your W-9, the PO number if they issued one, the payment terms from the contract, and where to send the money. Mismatched details are the leading legitimate cause of late payment, and finance departments do not proactively tell you your invoice bounced.
Short payments deserve their own paranoia. When $4,500 lands against a $5,000 contract, it’s one of three things: an agency commission you agreed to (fine — but book the gross and the commission separately, since you may be 1099’d for the gross), a wire fee (annoying, negotiable next time), or the brand deciding unilaterally that the deliverable was worth 90% (not fine, and only ever fixed by asking). The failure mode is not noticing — a deposit that roughly matches a deal gets mentally marked paid, and the missing $500 evaporates.
The tax side: income when received
Nearly all creators are cash-basis taxpayers, and the rule is refreshingly literal: income counts when you receive it, not when you earn it, invoice it, or scream about it. The deal you delivered in November and got paid for in January belongs to the new year — for your return and for your quarterly estimates. This cuts both ways: a slow-paying Q4 pushes tax into next year, and a catch-up quarter where three late invoices land at once spikes this one. If the deal includes product plus cash, the product is income too, at fair market value — the gifted-products guide covers that half.
Pipeline state maps cleanly to tax state: invoiced is money owed to you (an asset, not income yet); paid is income, in the quarter the wire lands. Post books it exactly that way, and the tax engine — federal, self-employment, your state — updates your set-aside the day the money arrives. Deals are the biggest checks in most creator businesses — the Instagram page shows the pipeline in context, and the calculator will tell you what a given deal actually nets after tax.
For a cash-basis taxpayer — which is almost every creator — income counts when you receive it, not when you invoice. The December invoice paid in January is next year's income, next year's quarterly estimate, next year's return. Your books should record both dates so the timing is provable.
First find out why — an agency commission you knew about reads very differently from a unilateral 'budget adjustment.' Check the contract and remittance details, then invoice for the shortfall in writing. Post flags short payments automatically when the deposit doesn't match the deal, so the gap gets noticed the week it happens instead of at year end.
Put them in the contract — a modest monthly percentage on overdue balances is standard in freelance work and costs you nothing to include. In practice the clause matters more than the collection: it converts 'whenever finance gets to it' into a number that grows, which moves you up the payment queue.