SUCCESS STORY
Pixsy

Pixsy reduces payouts workload 90% by automating royalty payouts

90%
Reduction in finance and admin per payment cycle
+10k
Data points organized, mapped, and imported
3 weeks
Full implementation of Trolley
Pixsy
Company Info
Website
www.pixsy.com
Industry
Legal-Tech, Royalties
HQ Location
United States
Customer Since
2018
Recipients
Photographers
Payout Countries
Global

Pixsy is a legal-tech service that monitors over 50 million images each day online to help photographers and agencies get paid for the use of their work. With clients all over Europe, the US, the UK, Canada, Asia, Australia and more, their payment needs are complex and requires support for multiple currencies, royalty calculations, tax reporting and more.

The challenge

Paying their clients all over the world is challenging enough by itself. As a US company, Pixsy has an additional layer of complexity to deal with – reporting payments made to the IRS. For each domestic (US) payee they need to collect a W-9 form, and for each international (non-US) payee, they need to collect a W-8 form, before payment happens. After collection of the form, they must note if withholding applies to this person, and withhold tax from payments if applicable.

Finally, at the end of the year, they must prepare a 1099-MISC form for payees with a W-9, and a 1042-S for all payees with a W-8, and deliver it to them electronically or by physical mail (the payee must be given the choice), at no cost to the payee. Although none of this adds value to Pixsy’s core offering, it must be done, as the IRS applies hefty fines for non-compliance. Kain Jones, CEO of Pixsy, knew that they needed a solution that helped them cut down on any manual administration work required to meet the IRS standards, as well as met their needs for payouts automation.
Kain Jones

"With thousands of payees worldwide, staying compliant with the IRS’s 1099 and 1042 regulations was time-consuming.

Trolley makes this and sending payouts easy, and allows us to spend more time on our core business."

Kain Jones – CEO of Pixsy

The solution

After choosing to partner with Trolley, Pixsy’s first task was to move their client data from the old provider to Trolley, so that payees didn’t need to re-enter their payout information. This was no small task with 10,000+ data points. Kain and his team worked with the Trolley onboarding team to organize the data and map it to the appropriate fields in the Trolley platform. Kain chose to use Trolley’s white-label Recipient Widget. This meant that his users could securely enter their payout (bank or PayPal) details & tax information without leaving the Pixsy user portal.

“After intensively evaluating 3 other solutions on the market it was clear Trolley offered the superior solution for our needs. Easy to use for internal users and clients as well as fully compliant with our IRS requirements. Sending payments worldwide couldn’t be easier.”

For payouts, Pixsy was able to leverage Trolley’s REST API and easily integrate the Pixsy system to trigger both PayPal and direct-to-bank payouts. They also took advantage of Trolley’s webhooks to live update internal systems and trigger update emails and in-app notifications to clients. To further automate administrative tasks, Pixsy also uses Trolley’s Xero integration for accounting reconciliation.

The results

After a 2-3 week implementation, Pixsy successfully launched with Trolley, and the results have been great. Pixsy has seen a 90% reduction in finance and admin time per payment cycle and a vast reduction in user support tickets related to payments and tax forms.

“Trolley’s product & engineering team has been attentive to feature requests, and is actively improving their product to make our daily use even easier – it feels great when something you suggested is added to the product 2-4 weeks later.”​

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