Most of the time you can opt out of the monitoring, but if you use that monitoring feature Upwork offers payment protection. Say that I clock in 20 hours and th

Most of the time you can opt out of the monitoring, but if you use that monitoring feature Upwork offers payment protection. Say that I clock in 20 hours and the client refuses to pay the invoice, I still get paid by Upwork (some caveats exist of course). Where there is more trust between client and contractor, the later might just enter their hours manually.