When you are ready to pay your affiliates, you can settle their balances.

Balances are settled on the Open balance page by clicking either Settle all filtered balances to settle all affiliates or Settle balance for an individual record.

For a detailed explanation of each settlement status, bulk status updates, and payout progress counters, see Settlement Statuses.

This will open a modal where you have the option to add a specific note for the settlement. This note can be used for multiple purposes, such as noting why the settlement was created, for whom it was created, and so on.

When you are done, use the Settle button to create the settlement.

This will mark the selected open balances as settled and move the selected records to the Settled balance section. Some records might not be moved due to missing information in the affiliate's payment method or billing details.

What is counted in your open balance

The total at the top of the Open balance page does not always include every affiliate. Amounts that cannot be settled yet, or that you have deliberately held back, are taken out of the total and shown as their own breakdown lines:

Payment method not set: the affiliate has no payment method saved, so they cannot be paid.
On-hold: conversions that are still on hold and not yet payable.
Billing status excluded: affiliates whose Billing status is set to Excluded. Hover this line to see the amount split into Open balance and On hold.

Excluded affiliates keep generating clicks, conversions and commissions as normal; only their contribution to the open balance total is held back. Every affiliate is Included by default, so if you have never changed the setting your totals behave exactly as before. See Affiliate Billing Status.

The Include bonuses filter decides whether unsettled affiliate bonuses count towards the open balance. It is set to Yes by default. With No, bonuses are removed from the total and from any settlement you generate while the filter is applied. See Affiliate Bonuses.

Prerequisites to pay out affiliates

To include an affiliate in a settlement, they need to:

have billing details filled in,
have a payment method set up,
and have their Billing status set to Included.

If billing details or a payment method are missing, the settlement for that affiliate will be skipped. If their billing status is Excluded, their amount is left out of the open balance total and reported on the Billing status excluded line instead.

For more information about Billing details, Payment methods and Affiliate Billing Status, see their respective articles.

Paying affiliates up to a certain date

If you would like to pay affiliates only up to a certain date, you can do so by specifying the date at the top left.

When the date is filtered, open balances of all affiliates are filtered only up to this date. This means that only conversions that happen on or before this date will move to the settlement.

Keep in mind that payments to affiliates are currently not automated. To pay out your affiliates, you'd still need to handle the payments or upload the settlement files to your payment service in bulk.

For semi-automated payouts, see Automated Payments via Tipalti.

Settled balance overview

In the Settled balance section, you can see detailed information about each settlement and you can download a .csv file for each of the settlements.

The list of settled balances shows you all the settlements that were created.

Settlement detail

The detail of the settlement contains information about the created settlement and a list of all affiliates with their settled balances, their selected payment method, and their billing details.

The detail of the settlement is opened by clicking on a row of the settlement in the table.

Details of the payment method and billing details can be shown by clicking the eye icons in the detail of the settlement.

Download the settlement

You are able to download all information about the settlement via the Export button in the detail of the settlement.

The Export PayPal button exports all records of settlements that have the PayPal payment method. This export is done to the specific format that PayPal requires for PayPal Mass Payments.

It will be grayed out and you will not be able to select it if it isn't set for the PayPal payment method.

You can export the settlement via CSV.