Run referral billing

Set the marginal commission brackets, read and settle the commission rows a scheduled job generates for every referrer, add manual payments, and understand why an Unconfirmed amount keeps changing.

How-to admin Admin → Billing & fees → Referral program billing

Users who bring publishers in earn a commission on those publishers’ revenue. Referral program billing is where you set the commission brackets and settle the monthly commission rows. The rows are not created by hand: a scheduled job regenerates the current month’s rows every hour, and a second job regenerates the previous calendar month once a day at 01:23 server time on the first four days of the month. A row is rewritten only while it is Unconfirmed; once you mark it Confirmed, Paid or Declined the job leaves it alone. Commissions below one cent produce no row.

Example. Northwind Media’s brackets are 10 % up to $1,000, 7 % from $1,000 to $5,000 and 5 % above. In October the sites referred by one user earn $6,000, so their commission row reads $100 + $280 + $50 = $430 — each share applies only to the slice of revenue inside its bracket, the way an income-tax band works. On 15 October the row still shows $210 (the month so far); on 1 November the job writes the full-month figure, and it stays at $430 once you mark it Confirmed.

Typical scenarios

You want	Do	Where
Pay 10 % on the first $1,000 of referred revenue, 7 % up to $5,000, 5 % above	Three rows in the active bracket table: $1,000 / 10, $5,000 / 7, and above / 5 → Apply now	Currently active brackets
Change the rates from the 1st of next month without touching this month	Edit the right-hand table → Schedule for next month	Brackets — activates on …
Settle October: pay every referrer whose row you have checked	Filter Year / Month, tick the rows, New status Paid → Apply	The ledger
Give one referrer a one-off $150	Filter / add payment: referral user, referred user, Amount 150 → Add	Filter / add payment
Keep referrers from seeing the referral details	Tick Hide referral details → its own Save	Referral display preferences
Hand the month’s ledger to accounting	Filter it, Export to CSV	The ledger toolbar

Step by step

Go to Admin → Billing & fees → Referral program billing. It needs the Referral Program Billing admin permission, the referral program enabled and bracket percentages agreed — see Referral program.
Maintain two bracket tables side by side. The left one, Currently active brackets — in effect since <the 1st of this month>, saves with Apply now. The right one, Brackets — activates on <the 1st of next month>, saves with Schedule for next month. Each row is an Upper bound ($) and a Share (%); Add bracket inserts a row above the trailing and above row, which is always open-ended. Neither table is ever empty: a network that has never configured brackets shows one open-ended row carrying the network’s flat referral rate, and adding rows above it turns that flat rate into the top band.
Rates are marginal: each bracket’s share applies only to the slice of revenue inside that bracket, not to the whole amount.
Optionally tick Hide referral details in the Referral display preferences section and click its own Save. The checkbox does not save by itself.
Use Filter / add payment to narrow the ledger by referral user, referred user, year, month and status. Year starts at the current year. The same row adds a manual payment: pick both users, type an Amount and optional Comments, then click Add. Add stays disabled until a referral user, a referred user and an amount are all set. Reset returns the filters to that starting state.
Work the ledger grid. Columns are Referral, Referred users, Year, Month, Amount, Status, Analytics status and Comments. Tick rows and pick a New status + Apply to bulk-update, Export to CSV to download the filtered ledger, or Delete to remove rows. Double-click a row to edit its amount, status and comments in a dialog.
Read the footer: Total is every row except Declined, Confirmed is only the Confirmed rows, Paid only the Paid rows — all three over the current filter.

Caveats and exceptions

The Referral users list is not every user who has referred someone. A referrer only appears there when their own role has the Manage Referral Program permission enabled. With that permission off for every role, the list is empty and no manual payment can be added — even though the ledger below may be full of rows. The Referred users list then fills from whoever the chosen referrer actually referred.
An Unconfirmed amount is not stable. The hourly job recomputes it from the month’s revenue so far and overwrites the row, so a figure you noted this morning can be larger by the afternoon. Move a row to Confirmed before you treat its amount as settled — that is what stops the job rewriting it.
From the fifth of the month, last month’s Unconfirmed rows stay as they are until you settle them: the previous-month job runs only on the first four days.
Editing brackets does not restate a generated month. Apply now changes what the current month’s Unconfirmed rows are recomputed to on the next hourly run; rows already Confirmed or Paid, and closed earlier months, keep the numbers they were generated with.
An invalid bracket set is rejected as a whole. If any row fails, nothing is saved. The error toast restates the rules rather than naming the offending row: “Brackets are invalid. Upper bounds must increase. Share must be between 0 and 100. Last bracket may be unbounded.” With more than two or three bands, check them yourself against those three rules.
A per-user share bypasses the brackets. A referral user with a per-user share configured gets a flat percentage of the referred user’s revenue; the brackets on this page apply only to referral users without that override.
Analytics status is not the payment status. It is the lowest accounting-period confirmation status across every advertiser whose traffic ran on that referred publisher’s sites that month — the weakest link. It stays at Incomplete Data until every contributing advertiser’s days have moved up, and reads Unidentified when no status has been recorded for them. See Accounting periods.
The commission base is read live. It is the sum of the Publisher-family Revenue for the referred user’s sites, each row floored at its minimal revenue, taken straight from the daily statistics at generation time — no aggregate in between, so it can differ from the Billing page’s publisher figures for days outside the 14-day aggregate window (see Where the numbers come from).

Not working?

Symptom	Check	Where
The Referral users list is empty although the ledger has rows	No role has Manage Referral Program enabled; the referrer must hold it on their own role.	Admin → Users & access → User roles & permissions
A row’s amount changed since yesterday	It is Unconfirmed; the hourly job recomputed it. Confirm it to freeze it.	The ledger Status
Last month has no rows for a referrer	Commissions below one cent produce no row, or the referred sites had no revenue. A missing amount can still be booked by hand with Filter / add payment.	The referred user’s sites in Billing; Filter / add payment
Apply now is refused with Brackets are invalid…	Upper bounds do not increase, a share is outside 0–100, or a bound is missing on a row that is not the last. The message does not name the row.	The bracket table
New brackets did not change an earlier month	Expected: closed months and Confirmed/Paid rows keep their generated numbers.	—
Add stays disabled	A referral user, a referred user and an amount must all be set.	Filter / add payment
Hide referral details did not stick	It has its own Save; the checkbox does not save by itself.	Referral display preferences
Analytics status stays at Incomplete Data	At least one advertiser whose traffic ran on the referred sites has not had its days moved up.	An Analytics report grouped by Advertiser — Accounting periods
The page is not in the sidebar	Your admin role lacks Referral Program Billing.	Admin roles & permissions

Reference

Field or column	Meaning
Upper bound ($) / Share (%)	A bracket: the revenue slice up to the bound, and the commission on that slice. The trailing and above row is open-ended.
Apply now / Schedule for next month	Save the left (active, since the 1st of this month) or right (activates on the 1st of next month) table.
Hide referral details	Referral display preference, saved with its own Save.
Referral / Referred users	The referrer and the user they brought in.
Amount	The commission for the month; recomputed hourly while Unconfirmed.
Status	Unconfirmed, Confirmed, Paid, Declined. Only Unconfirmed rows are rewritten by the jobs.
Analytics status	The lowest accounting-period status among the advertisers that ran on the referred sites that month.
Total / Confirmed / Paid (footer)	Every row except Declined / only Confirmed rows / only Paid rows — over the current filter.

Job	When	What it does
Current month	Every hour	Regenerates this month’s Unconfirmed rows from revenue so far
Previous month	01:23 server time, days 1–4 of the month	Regenerates last month’s Unconfirmed rows