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.
Filter 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:
- From your Admin Dashboard, select Marketing
- Select Affiliates
- Select the bar at the top of the page to filter based on a specific date range
If no date is selected, the page will show all available affiliate data by default.
Whilst you’re free to pay out your affiliates as you choose, we recommend waiting at least 30 days after the sale in case a customer requests a refund (any refunds you make 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!
Approve Commissions
Commissions have the status of 'Pending' until they’ve been approved by you.
To view an affiliate’s pending commissions:
- From your Admin Dashboard, select Marketing
- Select Affiliates
- Click on the Affiliate's name in the list
- Find the pending commission you want to deny or approve
- Select Deny or Approve
Pending commissions will be included in the total commissions as shown on the main Affiliates page, but if you deny a commission, it will be removed 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.
Record 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 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. To record the payment:
- From your Admin Dashboard, select Marketing
- Select Affiliates
- Click on the Affiliate's name in the list
- Click on Approve Payments
- Record the payment transaction and click Confirm
And that’s it! Any commissions included in the payment will now show as having been paid.