Connects ledger

Upwork shows the raw material. Its Connects page lets you view your Connects transactions "for the past 7, 30, and 90 days", and proposals, boosts, boosted messages and the Availability badge are all paid from the same balance. For an agency, every member draws on one shared balance. What Upwork does not show is a history older than ninety days, or which proposal each line belongs to.

The lines are not self-explanatory. A boost appears as a hold, then a release, then a final charge, sometimes in the same second. A fee refund arrives when a client cancels a job. A top-up can arrive with an amount that cannot be read. Reading the balance on two dates says how much was consumed, not on what.

A ledger fixes three things.

• Retention. Lines are copied as they appear and kept, so last quarter's cost per reply is still answerable.
• Attribution. Each line is joined to its job and to the member it was spent for, so a refund lands on the proposal that earned it.
• Settlement. A boost's verdict, held or outbid, comes from these lines and not from the badge on the proposal list, which is only a position; see boost settlement.

The ledger needs a login that is allowed to see the agency's Connects history. Without one, spend can only be estimated from what was bid, which overstates it, because many boosts come back.

How Upsight uses it. The ledger is the source of Connects per proposal, cost per reply, the P&L's spend lines and every boost verdict. A top-up whose amount could not be read is recorded at the amount requested, never at zero, so the price of a Connect is not inflated.