How to payout affiliates

Many of our customers are unsure if they are paying their affiliates out correctly, so here is a short description on how to do it.

Step one
Before anything else you should check if your settings are correct - check if your Payouts Balance is set with the right values. This is used for affiliates to choose on what level they want to be paid out.
After that check if your payout options are defined properly as there are methods how you will pay your affiliates. In Payout Options you can edit an individual payout option, add fields or define Mass pay export format. Both settings are located in Configuration section:


Step two
Navigate in the main menu to Payouts > Pay affiliates . Here you can see a list of all affiliates who earned commissions. (If you want to filter only the affiliates who reached their minimum payout balance then use the Advanced search button and turn on the option for "Show only those affiliates that reached minimum payout amount" and hit Search).
The important thing is to have all the necessary data from your affiliates. No data can be missing, neither payout method, nor payout data:



If this is missing, you will have to contact your affiliate and ask them to specify the missing data in their account.

Step three
If all the payout data for your affiliates is set correctly, you can pay one affiliate or multiple affiliates in the same time. In case you want to pay just one affiliate, click on the checkmark sign in Actions.


In case you want to pay more affiliates or all of them, you can use Mass payout option. Select all affiliates you want to pay at once and click on the button "Label as paid":


In both cases you will see this window:


In the fields on top you can set a note for you and for affiliate(s), set a custom date range to be displayed on the invoice as the date range the commissions were paid for. You can notify the affiliate(s) by an email that they have been paid. You can even have the generated invoices to be delivered to both you (the merchant) and affiliate(s) via email.
Once you hit "Label as paid payment" the commissions involved in the payout will be marked as paid. 

 
NOTE for self-hosted installations: If there is a cron job running regarding your installation of Post Affiliate Pro (Network) then the statistics data after payout will be updated with a few minutes of delay (at most up to 30 minutes).

Step four
At this point you have to navigate to Payouts > Overview > Payouts history and there you will see the list of existing (accomplished) payouts. You have to click the download icon next to the desired payout in order to export the payout details to a .csv file so that you can import that .csv file into your payment gateway and accomplish a real mass payout (send money to the affiliates involved in the payout).
 

No mass import allowed
If your payment gateway does not support mass payouts or import of mass payout files, you will need to pay affiliates one by one. In that case, you won't need any mass payout format defined.

Invoices
You can define the invoice format as well. This can be done in the merchant panel at Configuration > Invoice format.
If you allow generating invoices, the invoice will be generated for every payment you make. Both affiliate and you will be able to check the invoice at the payouts history section.