Switch to Trolley: Building a Toolkit for Smoother Transitions & Transactions

Undertaking a payout platform migration mid-cycle can present major challenges for businesses that rely on a consistent recipient experience, but by using the right tools to streamline the process, you’ll reap the benefits of leveling up almost immediately.

One problem we don’t have as a payouts and contractor tax solution provider is sourcing reasons why people want to change from their existing payouts solution. On a daily basis, we’re hearing about feature gaps, legacy UX/UI, poor customer support, a lack of routes, and missing integrations, to name a few.

However, the impulse to move that we hear about in our conversations is often well balanced by the friction of reality: A migration often means work for everyone involved. For merchants, migrating data is tough: formatting is all over the place, data can lost during transfer, systems and fileformats are not always compatible.

Beyond that, it’s a challenge for recipients whose positive experience is crucial to keeping many businesses operating. With dozens of data points, including banking (accounts), tax (TINS, W-8/W-9s), and other PII (names, addresses, DOB), collected from every recipient during their onboarding with the recipient portal or widget, moving it is risky—and a bit scary for most teams to do on their own.

So, how do you make the move from one payout platform to the other without adding and passing along headaches? We took the approach of building a complete set of tools to help companies move info to Trolley at the levels that are most atomic to how we work: validated recipient details and payment histories. If we move that data cleanly, the rest is easy.

But to start, we looked at who might benefit most from a smooth migration.

Who are we building for?

We know that our tools are beneficial to many teams with many different names, but we generally know that there are two main outcomes that people are looking for when adding/switching to Trolley:

Customers paying contractors:

They’re in finance or accounting and are paying folks and managing the end of year taxes related to those payments. At the moment they’re collecting W8/W9s, paying, and filing manually or using another platform like Tipalti, Stripe Connect, or Hyperwallet, but they’re missing features they need to keep up with growing numbers of recipients. A switch will only happen if it’s not going to interrupt their process. If they’re adding a tool, the change needs to happen quickly.

Customers who are building platforms:

These devs and product managers are building infrastructure for a company that needs to get people paid. To make a move, they feel engineers will need to spend way too much time moving data and creating new APIs. They’re not looking to have to “build” even after they’ve made a “build vs buy” decision.

In short, the goal is for people to be able to switch over to Trolley without any extra overhead.

Introducing our Trolley migration tools—including W-8/W-9 import

We offer our customers multiple ways to import recipient and payout history into Trolley. Everything from recipient data to validated bank information, W-8/W-9s, and KYC details can be imported via CSV or our powerful API, and in the near future, we’ll have data connectors available.

Our Trolley migration stack lets you:

• • Import W-8/W-9 information
    • • Rather than re-collect critical tax information when adding Trolley to your tech stack, our W-8/W-9 import tool lets you bring in all of your existing tax information with one simple import.

• • Validate recipient data
    • • Going beyond just adding data, Trolley validates bank account routing details and tax info (TINs/FTINs) during import. This means we’re ensuring you have 100% trust in all the data you’ve just added.

• • Import payment data
    • • Tax reporting is an annual affair, and you don’t need to be able to make the import happen on Jan 1. That’s why our tools are built to let you bring in the information that’ll complete the payout records for every recipient for the whole tax year and let you use it when you prepare your EoY tax reporting.

• • Import KYC or identity verification data (coming soon)
    • • As you validate and verify your customers for compliance purposes, retaining that data is invaluable in establishing and maintaining trust with them. We’re working to allow an import of that critical information in a way that integrates seamlessly with our upcoming ID verification product.

How easy is it to switch to Trolley?

As much as we wish it was a 1-click solution, it’s not that easy—yet.

But we believe that our customers are looking to work with the tools that will best serve their needs, and making that shift shouldn’t revolve around how much dev effort or manual process will be required vs just sticking with the existing tools.

Trolley’s import tools reduce the technical “lock-in” by reducing the engineering overhead while also minimizing concerns around data integrity. On top of that, your recipients won’t even know a change has been made, as they’re not going to need to re-fill forms or submit information a second time. If anything, they’ll only notice a change when you start sending payouts quicker, or when you use local routes, or leverage methods they’ve never had available to them in the past.If you have questions around these migration tools or would like to make the switch to Trolley, reach out today—we’d be more than happy to talk about getting you transacting with Trolley ASAP.