Operator guide

You run the venue. Barrow Pay's job is to make two things true without you picking up the phone: every vendor pays on time, and every vendor's paperwork is current. Here's the whole system.

1 · Getting set up

Sign in

Go to barrowpay.com and sign in with Google or an emailed sign-in link. There are no passwords. Your email is your identity.

Create your organization

Name your business, name your first venue, and pick what kind of venue it is: food truck park, recurring market, food hall, pop-up program, shared kitchen, or one-time event. The venue type sets sensible defaults; the product works the same everywhere.

Two choices made here decide what a rate means later, so they are worth a moment. A one-time event is dated and bills once. A venue where vendors pick which days they come prices per market day rather than per month. Both are covered below; both are easiest to set before your first vendor exists, because they change how every future invite reads.

The setup checklist

Creating your organization walks you straight into the first step, and whatever you skip waits for you on the dashboard as a short checklist:

1. Set your vendor requirements (what vendors must hand over).
2. Choose your plan.
3. Connect Stripe so payments can land in your bank.
4. Invite your first vendor.

The order matters, and the checklist enforces it: you cannot invite a vendor without a plan, and you cannot collect a dollar without Stripe. Steps that are not ready yet say why. The card disappears once you're set up. You can look around the whole product at any point; it's a path, not a cage.

Vendor requirements

Your requirements list is pre-loaded with the standard checklist for your venue type: certificate of insurance, health permit, W-9, signed agreement, rules acknowledgment. Trim it, add your own, and upload your vendor agreement PDF. Every vendor you invite to that venue works through that exact list. Changes save as you make them.

Requirements belong to the venue. If you run more than one, they share a checklist by default, which is usually what you want: a second truck park normally has the same rules as the first. The editor tells you when a list is shared, and Give this venue its own copy breaks it out so you can change one venue without touching the others. Settings shows which of your venues share and which stand alone.

Editing a checklist never rewrites what a vendor already agreed to. An agreement keeps the requirements it was created with.

Choose your plan

One flat monthly price, sized to how many vendors you carry. Your vendors never pay Barrow Pay anything. You can change plans at any time from Plan, and Stripe prorates the difference so you are never charged twice for the same month. You can move up whenever you like; you can only move down to a plan that still covers the roster you have.

Connect Stripe

Payments run on Stripe. Complete Stripe's onboarding, which is identity verification plus the bank account your payouts land in. Vendor payments are collected on your own Stripe account. You are the merchant, and the money is yours from the moment it is collected; it never passes through Barrow Pay. Stripe may take a day or two to finish verifying before charges are enabled. Once connected, Settings has a one-tap door into your Stripe dashboard for payouts, statements, and refunds.

2 · Venues

Each venue has its own page: who sells there, what they have to provide, and its sign-up link. Vendor counts, health, and balances all read from the same place your roster does, so the two can never disagree.

Sign-up links

Turn on a sign-up link for a venue and you get a web address you can post in a group chat or hand out at the gate. Vendors enter their own business name, contact details, and what they sell. A sign-up is not an agreement: nothing bills and no paperwork is chased until you set the rate and send the invite. Applications wait on that venue's page, and you can revoke the link at any time.

You write the questions. Business name and email are fixed, because they are how an invite reaches anyone, but past that you can ask whatever you actually need to know: short answers, long answers, pick-one, or yes/no. Do you need power? How long is your trailer? Have you sold with us before? Add them from the venue page.

An application keeps the question it was asked under, so renaming or removing a question later never rewrites what somebody appears to have answered.

Set terms & invite carries the venue with it, so accepting somebody from one queue cannot set them up at another. Not this one clears them from that venue's queue and leaves them waiting anywhere else they applied. We deliberately send nothing when you dismiss an application: turning somebody away is yours to say, in your own words.

Documents are never collected at application time. Somebody you have not accepted should not be handing over their insurance, and the checklist covers it properly once they are in.

One-time events

A Halloween market, a food festival, a single pop-up night. Pick one-time event as the venue type and give it a date, and the rest configures itself: vendors there are billed once, the charge lands a few days before the event so a failed payment still has room to retry, and the rate field is labelled a booth fee. Billing stops itself afterwards; there is nothing to remember to switch off.

Events get their own requirements list rather than sharing one, because two events are two different nights and editing December's rules should never rewrite what October's page said. The default list is shorter too, with no W-9: that form is about reporting a year of payments to a recurring tenant, and asking a Saturday booth for one is friction that collects nothing.

Once the date has passed the event drops out of your main venue list into a collapsed group of past events, so a year of Halloweens doesn't silt up the page.

The best part needs no setup: a vendor who already sells at your park re-uploads nothing for your event. Their documents and bank connection are already with you.

Putting a venue away

Venues are archived, never deleted. A season ends, a lot changes hands, an event is over: archiving takes the venue out of your grid, out of the invite picker, and out of every list, while every agreement, invoice and payment stays exactly where it is. Your history is the last thing you want a tidy-up to destroy. Bring it back restores it whenever you want.

You can only archive a venue once no agreement there is live and no invite is still pending. Think of it as a real put-away rather than a hide: an archived venue is gone from every screen, so one that kept billing would be charging people with nowhere left to notice it. Ending those agreements is you saying those vendors are finished here, and that is what makes the venue safe to put away. Agreements that have already ended never block it, because they are exactly the history archiving exists to keep.

3 · Market days

For a market where people come a different number of days each month. Vendors say which days they want, you approve, and the month's bill follows from what you approved. It is off by default and right to leave off for a truck park, where everyone pays a flat amount.

Setting it up

Turn on vendors pick which days they come when you create the venue, or later from the venue page, and set four things:

• Which days you run. More than one is fine: a weekend market that runs Saturday and Sunday is one market, not two venues.
• How often. Every week, every other week, once a month, first and last. The form shows you the actual dates your rule produces before you save it, which is worth more than any label: a wrong schedule is otherwise invisible until vendors are looking at the wrong days.
• How many spots a day has. You can override it for a single date, because a holiday market has fewer stalls than an ordinary Saturday.
• When picks close, set as a number of days before the month starts rather than a date, so it recurs by itself and you never reset it.

The rate is per market day, and it lives on the agreement, not the venue. The number you type when you invite somebody is what one day costs them, so a double stall, a farmer's rate, or a price somebody was grandfathered into are all just different agreements. Their bill is that rate times the days you approve.

The grid

Market days across the top with how many spots are taken, vendors down the side, and their month's total on the right. Tick and Approve ticked. New requests arrive already ticked, so approving the lot is one click when nothing is full.

There is no approve-all, deliberately: on an over-subscribed day it cannot mean what it says. Approvals apply in the order vendors asked and stop at capacity, and any day that filled is named back to you rather than quietly dropped, so you can decide who gets it.

A day a vendor asked for and did not get shows red. A day they pulled out of themselves shows grey, because nobody turned them away and the two are not the same event. Arrows move between months, and a finished month reads as history.

Telling vendors

Tell vendors their dates emails each of them their month: the days confirmed, anything declined, and what it comes to. Sending twice is harmless, and changing your mind later re-notifies exactly the people it affects. Nudge who hasn't picked chases anyone still silent before the cut-off.

Unlike a dismissed application, a declined day is always told. Somebody who asked for a specific Saturday and heard nothing would drive to a market with no spot for them, and silence there has a cost they pay.

When a day is called off

A washout, a holiday, a day you simply are not running: Call off a market day emails everyone approved so they do not turn up, and drops that day off every affected bill on the spot. Putting it back on restores it and re-bills whoever is still approved.

Vendors can pull out of a day too, which frees the spot, drops their bill, and notifies you straight away, since you are planning around who is coming. They cannot un-attend a day that has already arrived. If they change their mind again, they can ask for the day back; a day you decided is not theirs to undo from their phone.

How it bills

Approving writes an amount onto the ordinary monthly schedule, so everything downstream is unchanged: one invoice, the same autopay, the same dunning. Day-picking agreements bill monthly, and weekly is not offered, because the whole cycle is a month and a weekly bill would charge one slice of it.

The direction only goes one way: you set what one day costs and the month is worked out. A monthly figure cannot be turned back into a day rate, because months hold four or five of a given weekday. It also means a five-Saturday month bills five Saturdays, which is what per-attendance billing should do.

Days approved for a month before billing starts are not covered by any invoice. The grid flags those, and the fix is to move the first bill date on the agreement. It is not moved for you: that date is a term the vendor accepted, and you may have set it deliberately because you already collected that month yourself.

4 · Inviting vendors

Your part is one short form: the vendor's email plus the deal, meaning venue, rate, how often, and the first bill date. The form follows the venue you pick. A one-time event asks for a booth fee and sets itself to charge once, before the event. A market where vendors pick their days asks what one day costs and starts billing on the first of the month they will be picking for. A truck park asks for a rate and a cadence. This is not decoration: without it, a monthly figure typed into a field that charges per day would bill four times over. Barrow Pay does the rest. It sends the invite showing the exact terms, walks the vendor through onboarding, chases whatever is missing, and reports status. You watch it happen from the roster.

Inviting needs an active plan with room in it. If your plan is full, the invite page says so and offers the upgrade with the new price on the button. Nothing is ever charged without you clicking it. A lapsed or cancelled plan never touches the vendors you already have: billing and document chasing keep running, and only adding is paused.

• New vendors accept the terms, then get a checklist for your requirements: document uploads, e-signature on your agreement, acknowledgments.
• Vendors already on Barrow Pay accept in one tap. Their bank connection carries over, and portable documents (permits, W-9s, certificates) automatically satisfy your matching requirements, arriving in your review queue like anything else. The one exception is insurance: a certificate must name your business, so it is always requested fresh, and we write the email the vendor forwards to their insurance agent.
• Waiting invites appear above the roster with Resend (issues a fresh link and a new 30-day clock; the old link stops working) and Revoke. A pending invite counts against your plan's vendor count, because it is a spot you have committed.
• Send portal access emails, and texts if they have opted in, a fresh sign-in link to a vendor's portal at any time.

5 · Your roster

The roster is a list of vendors, one row each, whether they sell at one of your venues or several. Each row carries their worst health, their worst status, and everything they owe you across all of it. Five tiles above the table give you the shape of the roster at a glance.

Clicking a vendor who sells at one venue opens that agreement. Clicking a vendor who sells at several opens their vendor page, which lists every venue they stand at with its own status, balance and actions. Suspend, end and reopen live per agreement, because at vendor level those questions have no single answer: a vendor can be perfectly fine at your market and suspended at your lot.

One vendor, several venues

From a vendor's page you can add them to another of your venues. That creates a second agreement with its own rate, its own schedule and that venue's checklist. There is no new invite, since they have already signed up with you, and documents they have already given you carry over automatically.

6 · Reviewing documents

Every uploaded document waits for your review; nothing auto-approves. When a vendor submits, you get an email and an in-app notification, and the Review tab badge shows the queue. For each submission you can approve, ask for more info, request a resubmit, or reject, with a note the vendor sees in their portal.

Barrow Pay reads each document as it arrives and shows you what it found: expiry date, who is insured, who is named as certificate holder, coverage limits, and anything that looks off. That is there to save you squinting at a photo of a certificate. It never approves anything, and the reading sits beside what the vendor told us rather than replacing it, so a mistake can only ever cost you a second look, never manufacture compliance you don't have.

On insurance certificates, check that your business is named as certificate holder and additional insured, and that the expiry we read matches the document in front of you.

E-signatures and acknowledgments don't queue for review. The vendor's signed name and timestamp are the record, and you can see them on the agreement page.

A signature also keeps a copy of the document it signed, stored separately at the moment of signing along with a fingerprint of the file. Replace your park rules with a new version later and the old signature still produces the version that vendor actually read. Without that, a signature would point at whatever the file holds today, which is not a record of anything.

When every requirement is approved, the agreement activates itself and billing can start, with no button to press. You can also activate manually if you want to vouch for someone before the paperwork lands.

Paperwork keeps moving after a vendor is active. Certificates expire and you can ask for a fresh copy at any time with Request update on any requirement, which reopens it in the vendor's portal and sends them the chase.

7 · Money

How billing runs

Each agreement carries a billing schedule, being the rate and cadence from the invite. Every morning at 6 AM Central, Barrow Pay generates the invoices that are due, emails each vendor, and collects by ACH bank debit automatically if the vendor has connected their bank and autopay is on.

Agreements that end on a date

A schedule can carry a last bill date. Leave it blank and billing runs until you end the agreement, which is right for an open-ended spot. Set it and billing stops itself after that date, which is what you want for a seasonal vendor or a fixed term. Make it the same as the next bill date and the vendor is charged exactly once, which is how you handle a one-off event without having to remember to switch anything off afterwards.

These charges collect through autopay like any other invoice. You can move the date later at any time to start billing again.

ACH timing

Bank debits aren't instant. A payment shows processing for roughly 4 business days before it settles as paid. Money in flight isn't money owed, and the roster keeps the two apart.

When a payment fails

Barrow Pay runs the chase so you don't: retries with escalating notices after 2, 5, and 10 days, a final notice warning of suspension, and only if all of that fails, an alert telling you it is time for a human call, so you can reach out, waive, or suspend. If a vendor's bank connection has died, through a closed account or revoked authorization, we stop retrying and ask them to reconnect instead.

One-off charges

On any agreement page you can send a single invoice outside the schedule, for a gate repair or a replacement key, with an amount, due date, and memo. The vendor gets an email with a pay link. One-off charges are never auto-charged, deliberately: a vendor's autopay authorization is for the payments they agreed to, and a surprise debit is how autopay trust dies. If the charge is something they agreed to in advance, such as a booth fee, it is not a surprise and should not be a one-off: set the venue up as a one-time event, or give the agreement a last bill date, and it collects automatically like any other invoice.

Who charges what

Two separate things, and nothing is buried:

• Stripe's processing fee, which is 0.8% of each vendor payment capped at $5. This is Stripe's standard ACH bank-debit rate, charged by Stripe to you the same as for any business that takes bank payments. You will see it in your Stripe dashboard and payouts. It is the only fee that comes out of a vendor payment.
• Your Barrow Pay plan, a flat monthly price based on how many vendors you carry. Billed separately to your card, and never deducted from vendor payments.

Example: on a $500 vendor payment, Stripe takes $4.00, so $496.00 reaches you. Each paid invoice on an agreement page shows this breakdown, so your bank statement never surprises you.

Refunds

Issue refunds from your Stripe dashboard. Barrow Pay mirrors the refund automatically, the invoice and payment update, and you get a notification. Refunding a payment returns the vendor's money from your balance.

8 · Compliance on autopilot

Every expiry-bearing document carries its expiration date. From there the system runs itself:

• Renewal chases go to the vendor at 30, 14, and 3 days before expiry, and on the day it lapses, by email plus text if they have opted in, with an upload link.
• You get a daily digest only on days something is expiring, and no noise otherwise.
• Every agreement carries a health color: green for paid and covered, yellow for onboarding, expiring soon, or retrying a payment, and red for suspended, lapsed, or past due. The reason is always attached.

Suspend, reinstate, end, reopen

Suspension pauses billing and marks the vendor red; reinstating is one click, because it is a pause and not a breakup. A suspended vendor is not billed for the time they were suspended: billing picks up at the next date after you reinstate them, with no catch-up invoices for the gap. Invoices raised before the suspension stay owed. Ending an agreement works the same way, so future billing stops, open invoices stay collectible, and reopening resumes from the next date forward.

9 · Notifications

The Notifications tab collects everything the system did or noticed on your behalf: documents needing review, invites accepted, vendors signing up through a link, payments landed or failed, refunds, retries exhausted, expiry digests. The badge updates live, and you can mark items read one at a time or all at once. The email versions go to your notification address in Settings.

10 · Settings

• Business name, notification email, and phone.
• Your plan, with what you are on now and a link to change it.
• Vendor requirements, which link straight through for a single venue and list them for you to pick from if you run several.
• Stripe connection status and the door into your Stripe dashboard.

Also a vendor yourself? Same login. Create your vendor profile from the link at the bottom of Settings. Operator and vendor are hats on one account, never two accounts. If you already have a vendor profile under a different email address, sign in with that email rather than making a second profile.