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Affiliate Payout Schedules and Cadence

Plan weekly, biweekly, or monthly affiliate payouts around commission due dates, payout runs, provider exports, and reconciliation.

Table of Contents

AffiliateBase does not pay on a fixed schedule. Account owners and admins decide when to create payouts, and most teams pick a recurring cadence: weekly, biweekly, or monthly. This page explains how commission due dates work and how to plan a payout cycle.

How timing works

  1. A sale or conversion creates a commission in pending status.
  2. The commission moves from pending to due when the campaign’s Days until commissions are due has passed. AffiliateBase checks for newly due commissions every few minutes, so no action is needed. The default is 30 days.
  3. You create payouts with New Payouts on your cadence and pay them.
  4. You reconcile the payouts to paid.

Building a cadence

Common cadences:

  • Weekly: affiliates get paid sooner, but your team runs payouts more often
  • Biweekly: a balance of the two
  • Monthly: the least work for your team

Choose based on:

  • Cash-flow preference
  • Affiliate expectations
  • Internal finance bandwidth

For each payout cycle:

  1. Open Payouts.
  2. Select New Payouts.
  3. Review eligible affiliates and totals, then select Create payouts.
  4. For PayPal or Wise, select Export, create an export, download it, and pay it in PayPal or Wise. See bulk PayPal and Wise payouts.
  5. After the provider confirms payment, select Settle payouts on the export. This immediately marks every payout in the export paid, with no confirmation step; keep the provider’s batch or transaction ID in your own records.
  6. Confirm the payouts are in paid state.

Referral window and commission due date

Two separate campaign settings control timing. Both are in the campaign form:

  • Days before referrals expire: how long after a click the visitor has to sign up or buy. If they sign up in time, their first payment and renewals are credited. The default is 60 days when created in Setup or the API; the New campaign form pre-fills 90.
  • Days until commissions are due: how long after a sale the commission becomes payable. The default is 30 days, and 0 makes new commissions due at the next check. This page calls it the commission delay.

Guidance:

  • Set the commission delay to cover your refund and dispute risk.
  • Set the referral window to match how long customers usually take to decide.
  • Tell affiliates when their commissions become payable.

Schedule policy template

Use this example in your program terms:

  • Payout cadence: Monthly on the 5th
  • Commission delay: 30 days
  • Reconciliation SLA: within 2 business days of payout run
  • Exception handling: manual review for fraud/refund flags

Troubleshooting

No payouts available on run day

Open Commissions and check the Status and Due columns. The waiting period applies to each commission, not the date the affiliate joined. A pending commission with a future due date is still waiting; On hold means it has no due date, so open its details to check for a review hold. Waiting longer does not release a review hold.

When New Payouts has no eligible affiliates, it explains the recorded blockers and shows the next commission due date when one is scheduled. That date is not a promised payment date: minimum payouts, affiliate status, and refund or dispute adjustments still apply. Use View commissions or View campaigns to inspect the records.

To check the waiting period, open Campaigns, select your campaign, and look for Commission waiting period. To change it, edit Days until commissions are due. The default is 30 days. Changes apply to newly created commissions; existing commissions retain their saved due dates. Review holds follow their separate approval process.

Check:

  1. Commissions are due (not still pending).
  2. Affiliates have the payout details for your current payout method.
  3. Affiliates are active. Commissions for affiliates marked suspicious are held until you approve the affiliate or review each commission.
  4. The campaign’s Minimum payout is met.
  5. Clawbacks from refunds or disputes after an earlier payout are deducted from the affiliate’s earnings in the same currency across campaigns. A clawback larger than those earnings holds them.

Runs created but not fully settled

Check:

  1. The payments finished in PayPal or Wise.
  2. No PayPal or Wise recipient details are missing.
  3. Any remediation hints in payout run reconciliation.

Best practices

  1. Keep your cadence predictable and share it with affiliates.
  2. Assign an owner for each payout run.
  3. Store payout references for every completed run.
  4. Resolve failures right away instead of letting them pile up.

Next steps

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