Payouts

Your accounts, your money flow

Payouts go directly from you to your partners using your own PayPal or Stripe credentials — the plugin is the bookkeeper, never a middleman holding your money. Under Settings → Payments, PayPal and Stripe each have their own card with an on/off toggle, credential fields, and a Test connection button that verifies the saved credentials against the live API and reports the result in plain language. Test results are recorded in the activity log.

Prefer bank transfers, Wise, or cash in an envelope? Record payouts manually — the ledger treats them identically.

Running a payout

Affiliates → Payouts shows each partner's payable balance (matured, approved referrals only — see the lifecycle). Select who to pay, choose the method, confirm. Which referrals were covered is recorded, balances reset, and partners see the payout in their dashboard history.

Decide your cadence deliberately — monthly with a minimum threshold suits most stores; the trade-offs are in payout schedules, and the platform mechanics (PayPal Payouts API requirements, Stripe transfer options) in paying affiliates via PayPal & Stripe.

The ledger

Every payout state change — created, sent, completed, failed, recorded manually — lands in an append-only ledger with an immutable audit trail. Nothing is ever silently edited: corrections are new entries, not rewrites. Six months later, "what exactly did we pay Jane in March, and who triggered it?" is a lookup, not an investigation. Why this design matters for a program you might someday hand to an accountant or a buyer: inside the payout ledger.

Taxes

The plugin keeps yearly totals per partner exportable, which is what your accountant actually needs. Collect partners' business/tax details at onboarding (a custom application field does it), and read the merchant-side overview in affiliate program taxes — then confirm specifics with a professional in your jurisdiction.