We give you access to full reporting on affiliate commission owed, making it super easy for you to make payouts according to your policy and your schedule!
In this article:
About This Feature
Once your affiliates are up-and-running and the sales are coming in, you can use the Affiliates page in your Admin Dashboard to manage your payouts. Our Affiliate page is designed for tracking purposes only. It allows you to view the amount owed to each affiliate, and have full control over approved payments, payout policies, and schedules - but the payments themselves are processed outside of Thinkific.
Filtering Commissions by Date
From the Affiliates page, you can quickly get an overview of the total commissions owed and paid. To access the Affiliates page, click Affiliates under Market & Sell in the menu on the left-hand side of your Admin Dashboard.
By default, this page will show you all affiliate data, but you can select the bar at the top of the page to filter based on a specific date range.
Whilst you’re free to pay out your affiliates as you choose, we recommend waiting at least 30 days following the sale in case the customer requests a refund during that time (any refunds you make from your Stripe or PayPal account will be removed from the affiliate’s commission automatically).
A simple system would be to process all payouts from June, for example, at the beginning of August. To do that you could select Custom Range and then select June 1st-June 30th.
Once you’ve filtered your commissions, you’re ready to approve them ahead of making your payouts!
Approving Commissions
Commissions have the status of 'Pending' until they’ve been approved by you.
To view an affiliate’s pending commissions, click on the Affiliate's name within the list on the Affiliates page.
On the next page, you’ll see the list of pending commissions and can deny or approve them.
Pending commissions will be included in the total commissions as shown on the main Affiliates page, but if you deny a commission that will discount it from the total.
You will need to approve any pending commissions before you can record a payment for them, so go ahead and do that now by hitting 'Approve' for each one.
Recording a Payment
Payments are made manually by you, outside of Thinkific, so it's totally up to you how you want to manage that! One popular solution is to use PayPal, and create a schedule/reminder for yourself to send the funds owed to your payees on a regular basis (e.g. once a month). You have the flexibility here to set up a process that works best for you and your business.
Once you’ve made a payout you can come back and record it on Thinkific, allowing you to easily track what’s been paid and what’s still owing.
From the Affiliates page, click on the name of the user, and from their profile, you can click on the "Approved" payments to record a payment:
You'll be prompted with a pop-up to confirm that you want to record the payment:
And that’s it! Any commissions included in the payment will now show as having been paid.