It's the second week of December. The accountant sends the email she sends every year: "Can you get me a list of everyone you paid as a contractor in 2025 and the totals?"
The photographer opens Venmo and scrolls. There's the second shooter from the June wedding. There's the associate from September, paid in two parts because she'd forgotten the overtime. Then she opens Zelle, because the October shooter didn't use Venmo. Then a notes app, where she is fairly sure she wrote down a day rate for someone whose name she can't quite place. Somewhere there's a text thread with an assistant about a cash tip she reimbursed.
Two hours later she has a spreadsheet she doesn't fully trust. "Before I had a system," she told us, "I was a mess in my accounts."
Second shooters, associate photographers, assistants, day-of coordinators, extra servers, a backup DJ. Almost every wedding vendor pays other people to help deliver the day, and almost none of them set up a payment system before they started doing it. The first second shooter got paid however was easiest that day, and that became the process.
The payment record ends up living wherever the money moved. That's fine in June. It is not fine when the accountant asks, or when a shooter asks in March whether you sent her the second half of October, or when you're trying to work out whether last year's associate costs were 12% of revenue or 20%.
The tax side shifted recently, which makes clean records more useful rather than less. The 1099-NEC reporting threshold moved from $600 to $2,000 for payments made in 2026, under the law signed in July 2025, as OnPay lays out. Payments made in 2025 still used the $600 line, and those forms were due on February 2, 2026. Either way, you need to know the annual total per person to know who crosses the line. Venmo doesn't add that up for you.
We heard the same praise from two photographers who didn't know each other. Both said the thing they liked most about their setup was paying a shooter through the same platform that held the contract and the invoice for that wedding. "It just goes right to their bank account," one said. The other's version was about December: "I just print it out at the end of the year and send it to my accountant." Neither of them mentioned speed or fees first. They mentioned not having to reconstruct anything.
The way this works in Maroo starts with Time Tracker. The week of the wedding, log an entry for the second shooter: the project it belongs to, the hours or the flat day, the rate, and whether it's billable. That entry is the record. It shows up inside the wedding's Project and in your main Time Tracker list.
Then pay from the entry. Maroo sends the contractor payment by ACH to the shooter's bank account, and business-to-business transfers carry no fee. The payment is tied to the time entry, which is tied to the project, which is tied to the couple's contract and invoice. In March, when the shooter asks about October, you open the project and the answer is there.
December becomes a download. Maroo collects each contractor's W-9 when you first pay them, tracks who's missing one, and prepares the 1099-NEC forms from the year's totals in Tax reporting. The accountant gets a report instead of a spreadsheet you don't trust.
Before the next wedding, decide that every contractor payment gets logged as a time entry the same week, with the project it belongs to. Not after the season, not in December. The week of. It takes two minutes and it means the year-end list already exists when the accountant asks.
If you're still paying shooters from three different apps, Maroo is free to start and the Starter plan includes contractor payments.
