Automatic Payouts

Automatic payouts remove the need to click "pay" for each affiliate one at a time. You save a card once, and Insert Affiliate runs a daily payout that pays every affiliate you owe, as a separate Stripe charge per affiliate and currency, exactly like paying them yourself.

Requirements

  • A saved card (added in your settings, stored securely by Stripe)
  • Affiliates who have completed their Stripe Connect setup. Affiliates without a connected Stripe account are skipped and can still be paid externally.

Your company does not need its own Stripe Connect account for automatic payouts. Each payout is a charge on your saved card, paid directly into the affiliate's Stripe account.

Setting Up

  1. Go to Settings, Payments & Payouts and find the Automatic payouts section
  2. Click Add a card and save the card you want payouts charged to. If your bank asks you to verify the card, complete the check; this is what allows future payouts to run without you present
  3. Switch Automatic payouts on
  4. Set your Minimum payout. An affiliate is only paid once they are owed at least this much (in USD). It saves as soon as you leave the field

Changes in this section apply immediately; the Save changes button at the bottom of the page is not needed here.

How the Daily Run Works

Once a day, Insert Affiliate:

  • Works out what each affiliate is owed, using exactly the same calculation as the manual payout buttons
  • Pays each affiliate who is owed at least your minimum and has a completed Stripe account. Rewards owed in different currencies are paid as separate charges in those currencies, at the amounts promised
  • Skips affiliates below your minimum, affiliates who have not finished Stripe onboarding, and all sandbox transactions
  • Marks the paid transactions, updates totals, and generates self-billing VAT invoices if you have them enabled
  • Emails you a summary of what was paid, what failed, and what was skipped

Each payout appears on your card statement individually. Standard Stripe processing fees apply (view current rates).

You can also trigger a run yourself at any time with Run now, and you can still pay any affiliate manually; manual and automatic payouts are aware of each other, so nothing is ever paid twice.

Run History

The Recent runs table in the same section lists your latest runs. Click View details on any run to see exactly which payouts were made, which failed and why, and which affiliates were held back. Clicking an affiliate takes you straight to their page.

When a Payout Fails

  • If an individual affiliate's payout fails (for example, their Stripe account is no longer valid), the rest of the run continues. The failed amount stays owed and is retried on the next run, and you can always pay it manually instead
  • If your card itself is the problem (declined, expired, or your bank insists on verification), automatic payouts pause so you are not charged repeatedly. The section shows a notice, the summary email tells you, and saving a new card or switching payouts back on resumes them

Refunds and Clawbacks

A refund reduces what an affiliate is owed by exactly the commission that sale earned, in the currency it was earned in. What happens next depends on whether that commission had already been paid out.

Refund before payout

The refund is applied the moment it arrives, even inside your payout hold. The sale and its refund cancel each other out and the affiliate is never paid for it. This is what the payout hold is for: set it to cover your refund window and most refunds land before any money leaves.

Refund after payout

The affiliate has already received the commission, so their balance with you goes negative by that amount. From then on:

  • Any new commission they earn from you in the same currency cancels the negative balance first. Nothing is paid until it is back above zero, and only the amount above zero is ever charged to your card.
  • The run detail lists them under skipped with the reason "Refunds exceed new rewards", and their page shows the negative balance.
  • Nothing is taken from the affiliate's Stripe account. Unless you switch on recovery below, this is where it ends: if they never earn from you again, the balance simply stays negative.

Refunds are confirmed before they count

A refund only reduces what an affiliate is owed once Insert Affiliate has confirmed it with the record owner: RevenueCat or Adapty for companies on those platforms, Apple or Google Play for companies on the native integration, Stripe for web sales. That needs a read-only key from you, added under Settings, Integrations: your RevenueCat secret API key, your Adapty secret key, or an App Store Connect API key (the Play service account you already use covers Android). Until a refund is confirmed it is held aside and does not net anything; if it still cannot be confirmed after a day it is flagged and shown to you. Without a key, refunds keep netting as before but can never be recovered.

Each refund row in your affiliate search shows where it stands: Validated, Validating, Not validated, or Unvalidated in light grey when there is no key for your platform, with a question mark that explains the state and links to the key field. Your affiliates see the same row as either Validated or Validation pending; they are never shown anything about your setup.

Recovering a negative balance (optional)

In Settings, Payments & Payouts, Payout policy, under Negative balances, you can choose to recover balances that stay negative for longer than a window you set (30 days by default). The switch only becomes available once your confirmation key is in place. With it on, each day Insert Affiliate:

  1. Notes the first day each currency balance goes negative for an affiliate.
  2. Lets new commission cancel it during the window, as above.
  3. Attempts to email the affiliate 7 days before the window ends, with the amount and the date. Recovery does not depend on that email being delivered.
  4. On the due date, if the balance is still negative, refunds part of the most recent payout you made to that affiliate through Stripe, for the outstanding amount, working back through earlier payouts if one is not enough. Each payout is only ever refunded up to what the affiliate actually received from it after Stripe's processing fee, so the fee on the original payout stays where it was. The refund is issued on the affiliate's Stripe account and the money returns to the card that paid the original payout, where it shows as a refund.
  5. Records the recovery against the refunded sales so the balance nets to zero and the affiliate's paid earnings drop by the amount taken back, recounts their totals, emails the affiliate a confirmation, and emails you a summary of what was recovered.

Nothing in the affiliate's history is deleted or rewritten: the refunded sales stay on their record with the settlement alongside. In the rare case that Stripe later fails the refund (for example the card that paid the original payout no longer exists), the money returns to the affiliate's Stripe balance, the settlement is reversed, and the balance carries forward again; that payout is not used for recovery a second time.

What is never recovered

  • More than the reversed commission, or more than the affiliate actually received after Stripe's fee.
  • Refunds you report yourself through the transactions API, or record by hand. Those still reduce what the affiliate is owed, but only refunds that reach us from Apple, Google Play, RevenueCat, Adapty or Stripe are recovered.
  • Payouts made before recovery existed, which do not carry the Stripe charge reference. Refunds of those sales carry forward; the run tells you so.
  • Anything the affiliate was not actually paid by you through Stripe. Recovery only ever refunds your own earlier payouts to that affiliate. An affiliate you paid outside Stripe has nothing to refund, so their balance carries forward instead and the summary tells you.
  • Bonus payments.
  • Anything from an affiliate who has not accepted the current Insert Affiliate terms, which include the recovery clause. Existing affiliates are asked to accept them the next time they sign in; until they do, their balance carries forward and you are told once.

Where the money comes from

The refund is deducted from the affiliate's Stripe balance. If that balance cannot cover it, their Stripe account goes negative and Stripe recovers the difference under the affiliate's own agreement with Stripe, normally by debiting the bank account linked to their account. Insert Affiliate never debits an affiliate's bank directly and takes no part of the amount recovered.

What Affiliates See

Affiliates have a How you get paid card in their own settings showing the terms you have set for them: their commission, whether renewals earn, that payouts are automatic and daily, and your minimum. If their Stripe account is not ready to receive payouts, it tells them what to do.