Acceptance and release

Signing off a milestone, releasing its payment, and what happens if the engagement is cancelled.

Money leaves escrow one milestone at a time, and only on your say. This page is the sequence.

The agency submits

When the agency considers a milestone finished, it submits it for review. The card moves to Client review and the milestone shows as waiting for you. Only one submission per milestone is open at a time, and the agency can withdraw it before you answer.

You accept or ask for changes

You have two answers:

• Accept. The milestone is done and its payment is released, see below.
• Ask for changes. Say what is missing, against the acceptance criteria in the plan. The agency revises and submits again. There is no limit on rounds, and asking for changes costs nothing; it is the normal way a milestone converges.

Judge against the criteria you wrote in the plan, not against what you have since thought of. Something new belongs in a change request or the next milestone, not in a rejection.

Accepting releases the payment

Accepting a submission is the release: the moment you accept, that milestone’s tranche moves from escrow to the agency. There is no second confirmation, which is why the acceptance criteria in the plan matter. Each tranche is independent: accepting milestone two does nothing to milestones one or three, and a tranche can never be released for a milestone you have not accepted.

A release is final for that tranche. Matchii then settles the released amount with the agency; that step is Matchii’s, not yours, and it does not change what you owe.

Cancelling

Either side can ask to cancel an engagement. Matchii resolves the request, and the outcome is one of three: the engagement resumes, it is cancelled, or it goes to arbitration because the two sides disagree about what was delivered.

On cancellation the rule is simple: what you have released stays released, and the unreleased remainder of the escrow returns to your credits. Money that left for accepted work is not clawed back; money for work not accepted is not kept.

After the last milestone

When every milestone is accepted and released, the engagement is complete. What it took and how it went are part of what Matchii learns from, which is how the next match for a brief like yours gets better.