Most agencies still manage payouts the same way they did in 2018: a brand pays, a finance person opens a spreadsheet, math gets done in three places, and four different people get DMs asking where their money is. The whole system runs on goodwill and Excel.
Riff handles this differently. You define the split once at the contract level, and every payment that lands against that contract is fanned out automatically.
The split lives on the contract, not the payment
The most common mistake teams make is treating splits as a per-payment decision. That's where the manual math creeps back in.
In Riff, splits are attached to the campaign or contract — once, at the start. Every dollar that arrives against that contract knows where it's going before it touches your account.
One inbound, many outbound
A typical Riff payout looks like this: brand pays one invoice, Riff queues a series of outbound transfers (manager 15%, agency 20%, creator 65%), and each party sees their share land in their account within the same banking window.
There's no batching delay, no end-of-month reconciliation, no "let me check with finance" email thread.
What it looks like on the dashboard
For the agency owner, the dashboard shows the full waterfall: total received, fees, taxes withheld, and the exact amount sent to each downstream party — with timestamps. That's also the document your accountant will ask for at tax time, already in the right shape.
The takeaway
If your payout process still ends with a person doing arithmetic, you're carrying a risk that compounds with every new creator you sign. The point of Riff isn't to make splits faster — it's to remove the human from the math entirely.