Just two days ago I had a mother ask me if she could pay for her son's piano lessons with paypal. I told her that would be fine (not worried about it).

I don't have any particular axe to grind with accepting digital payments. But if the trucker convoy in Canada, and most recently, Russia, have taught us anything, it's frightening just how quickly you can be cut off from digital money once the eye of Sauron turns upon you.

I think it's wise to have such an option at your disposal, in addition to cash or checks. I've used Zelle and PayPal for direct payments. I actually think it's better than checks because funds are guaranteed to be there or else the other party can't try the transaction in the first place, whereas checks can bounce and then you have problems on your end.

The ideal is to have one check made out for everything by the couple to the church and have it paid through the church. Same goes for funerals.

I use Venmo and PayPal pretty regularly in personal life. No issues with either and there are no fees to worry about for the kind of small-dollar transactions organists can afford to make. I have happily taken payment for musical work on them before, in the kind of situation where one big check is written by the event organizer to a bandleader, who then pays the sidemen their shares.

However – I would be *quite* nervous about regularly using it for weddings/funerals, which provide a substantial portion of my income at St. X parish and really do need to be routed through church payroll as additional income beyond salary. Otherwise, you lose a good deal of money filing a 1099 and paying self-employment tax for all that $$$ (or you don’t report and risk an audit or worse). Better to have one big check to the parish far in advance of the date, and let someone else do the accounting and hounding – doubly so when there is a cantor to be paid.

Putting it in writing on the church website that “the organist gets $300/wedding; send $300 on Venmo to @JohannSBach” feels like an invitation to the auditors.

^one of the unfortunate consequences of the US being at the center of the financial world is that while you can transfer money, we tend to farm it out to unregulated (or less-regulated-than-banks) companies instead of embracing ISO standards and SWIFT for all institutions. It's perfectly normal in Europe as tomjaw notes to do a transfer, and while mistakes can be made, the software does its best to stop them.

I will not accept anything other than cash or check up front before parking my donkey on the bench to play a wedding. I have lost over $1,000 in stipends because couples arrived for the wedding and "forgot the checks": It's hard enough trying to track down people for tangible moneys, going digital just seems like asking them to stiff you.

I contracted a string quartet years ago for a large Korean wedding. The father was supposed to pay me after the wedding. The quartet was invited to have dinner afterwards, so we did. Just before dinner, the father gave me an envelope. There was money inside, but only about a fourth of what we were supposed to receive. So we spent the dinner discretely discussing what to do, trying to figure out if it was just an error, or whether he stiffed us on purpose, etc.
Then near the end of dinner the father approached me again with another envelope, and he indicated that the first envelope had just been our tip. Which was nice but very confusing (especially since I was still young and dumb).
Now I hardly do weddings anymore, but I require payment a week in advance, and I use an AFM contract which has very stern wording.

For weddings I require payment of fees for all musicians in full one month in advance. Nobody has balked at that. That gives ample time for checks to clear. It would be the same if digital payments were accepted: those would have to be transacted a month in advance.

In my wedding guidelines I stipulate that late payments not received by 10 days before the wedding must be paid in cash only. Digital payments would be as good as cash in the event I move in that direction. I also stipulate that if payments are not received by the fourth day before the wedding then unpaid services will not be provided.

For funerals my guidelines request payment on or before the day of the funeral.

AFM probably refers to the musicians' union.

Yes, AFM = American Federation of Musicians.

Chris: at least five at $200 a piece over the past 15 years (priests have been stiffed, too), and we don't have many, only a couple every few years (there have been more years without weddings than with). At this point, I'd basically resigned myself to the fact that I'll probably be doing weddings for free, since the parish was unwilling to compensate: thankfully, we've had a change in the business/financial/business end of things, with things being run by a feisty New Yorker, so "offer it up" and "Jesus did it for free" has been replaced with "this is your job, and you're entitled to payment".

As I've researched this, Zelle merely facilitates transfers between bank accounts whereas Venmo and PayPal receive money into a separate user account from which funds can either be disbursed or transferred to a linked bank account.

Zelle has confirmed that it is exempt from the new law this year that requires payment apps such as Venmo and PayPal to report business income to the IRS if it totals $600 or more during the tax year.

I'm revising my music information packets for funerals and weddings to include QR codes that would enable people to pay fees using Zelle, Venmo and PayPal besides still accepting payment via checks or cash.

SponsaChristi,

Since I've no idea what an "email transfer" is, at least in my circles in the States, the answer is "no".

Since I've no idea what an "email transfer" is, at least in my circles in the States, the answer is "no".

Bank apps allow you to send someone money to deposit in their account by emailing it to them. It’s a great feature.