When I meet someone new, and they tell me they're a freelancer, I almost always have the same (silent) thought: How can you afford it?
Apparently, lending institutions and landlords feel the same way. Anyone who's ever tried to sign a lease on an apartment knows how difficult it can be to convince a landlord that you're solvent. But it's a whole lot harder if you work for yourself and can't exactly present a monthly paystub as proof of steady income. According to a report from Zillow, self-employed people receive 40 percent fewer loan quotes from lending institutions than other people. And if, as they say, contract labor is the future of work, that's a big problem.
Staring today, though, Payable, a software company that helps contractors get paid, is helping to make it a little easier. Payable already processes millions of dollars of payments to contract workers every month through its app, which employers such as FuseDesk and Neat Method use to track labor costs, among other things.
According to the company, workers who get paid via Payable repeatedly highlighted the frustration they experienced when trying to provide proof of income, and asked the company to design a solution. As a result, starting today, when a worker gets paid for a job on Payable, he now has the option of auto-generating a PDF of the invoice for the job. And if he accruing these PDFs over time, the thinking goes, it should be easier for him to walk out of a bank or a leasing office with the money or the apartment he was after. In a press release, Payable CEO Tad Milbourn referred to the new feature a form of financial empowerment.
It may seem backwards for a tech company to build an feature for a digital payments platform that ultimately generates ... paper. But to hear Payable tell it, creating solutions for its user base ultimately meant designing a solution to a systemic, slightly retrograde problem. Contract labor may be the future, but here in the present, Uber drivers and TaskRabbits need homes and cars, too.