Setting up a Marketplace affiliate in the UI

Calculate the commission owed to a partner using Marketplace

The Affiliate Marketplace lets you set up an account for a partner or salesperson, who will be paid based on sales of a chosen plan. Billforward will calculate the correct payments (and create an affiliate invoice to track it), but it’s up to you to transfer the money and mark the invoice as Paid.

To calculate payments owed to an affiliate partner, first set up an account for them. Next, open the account and select Add affiliation from the drop-down in the upper right.

You’ll be asked to choose a plan. The affiliate account will receive a payout whenever another customer is charged under the selected plan.

In this example, the subscription-billing plan has been chosen:

Finally, choose how the payout will be calculated:

• Description: this description is only for your benefit—it won’t appear on the invoice.
• Pricing Component Name: this can be left blank, but if provided then the affiliate partner’s payout will be calculated based on the money collected for the given pricing component only.
• Calculate as: whether to calculate the payout as a percentage of the invoiced amount, or a fixed amount per invoice.
• Payout: the amount to pay the affiliate.
  In the above example, the partner will receive 5% of all money collected under the subscription-billing plan.

Once the affiliation has been set up, the following information will appear on the account page of the affiliate account:

Note that if you set a description earlier, the card title will reflect this.

Changing affiliate dates

The change dates button allows you to change the date range in which the affiliate relationship is active. An affiliate will be paid for all invoices issued within the date range you choose.

Note that changing the dates will not create or remove affiliate payouts for invoices that have already been issued — it will only affect new invoices.

Affiliate invoices

Once an affiliation has been set up, Billforward will calculate the payment owed to the affiliate and start generating invoices to record this amount.

Invoices will be generated automatically in the background, but you can always generate them immediately if you need to: open the Actions menu and choose Generate affiliate invoices.

When you’ve transferred money to the partner, you can mark the associated invoice as paid by going Actions > Add offline payment.

Reporting

You can download a report of all affiliate invoices in the system by going to Reports in the left-hand menu and choosing Marketplace.