Clients can send a Bring Your Own (BYO) invitation to agencies they know outside Upwork. They're asking you to join Upwork and continue doing business with them through our platform.
Benefits of joining Upwork
Upwork helps you connect with top businesses around the world, or near you. We simplify the process of managing your agency, collaborating, and invoicing clients. With Upwork, you’ll experience:
- Simplified invoicing and payment processing; work is covered by Upwork Payment Protection and clients are invoiced automatically on hourly contracts
- Get paid within days of completing work; payments become available for withdrawal within days of completing your work
- Find additional work with global companies; with hundreds of thousands of active clients, finding new work has never been easier
As an agency owner, you’ll have a free Agency Plus membership, which includes access to Uma and be able to add agency members as you grow your business.
Before creating an Upwork account, you should
- Identify the agency account owner; this person will have full access to and responsibility for the agency account
- Identify account email address to receive project requests and client communications
* Please note that if you received a BYO freelancer invitation and not a BYO agency invitation, you will need to create a freelancer account prior to creating your agency.
Setup your agency account
Once the agency account “owner” receives an invitation, it’s time to set up your Upwork account.
- Click on the link from your invite to activate your account
- Enter basic information to set up your account
Once the agency account is created, the next step to getting started is to accept the contract. Then, you can go back to your Settings to:
- Add a payment method. Setting up a payment method is required to withdraw earnings
- Add a billing method. A billing method is required to pay for your Agency Plus membership fee or to make other purchases on Upwork, such as Connects
- Complete your agency profile. Having a complete profile will help your agency stand out
Add additional team members
- Go to Membership & Connects
- Enter your promo code or credit card to upgrade to an Agency Plus membership
- Go to Members & Permissions
- Select Invite New User
Tip:
If the agency member will not be working on Upwork outside the agency, you can set their profile to exclusive. You should discuss this and come to an agreement with your team.
- Go to Settings › Members & Permissions
- Select Invite a New User and fill in the form, including choosing roles and permissions.
- Select Invite User. The person will receive a notification to join your team and can accept or decline your invitation.
All agency members must have their profile visibility set to private to ensure the agency is not discoverable on Upwork. To manage your agency members’ profile settings, go to Find Work › Agency Roster.
To set your own profile to private
You can set your own freelancer profile account to private from your Find Work page.
- In the dropdown under your profile picture in the top right corner, select your freelancer account
- Choose Settings > Profile Settings
- In the Visibility section, choose Private