Why are correct financial settings important?
As you continue to set up your partnership program, let’s tackle the next important step: finance and budgeting. Partnerships comprise business agreements that require timely transactions and transparent billing. If you set up your finances well from the beginning, your program operations will be more effective, and your relationships with partners — more successful.
A partnership platform like impact.com allows advertisers to automate financial processing and billing completely. Automation means your team will avoid tedious manual transactions, and you won’t need a dedicated finance team or any additional resources to manage this part of your program.
The financial aspects of your program include things like payouts, invoicing, and recurring platform fees. Here are the key tips on how to finetune your finance and billing settings to launch your partnership program:
Tips for finance and billing success
Learn about the action life cycle
An action is a conversion (a sale or a lead) that impact.com credits to a partner. Actions follow a “life cycle” that shows how an initial action travels through approval toward the payout stage. In short, you will need to approve and lock actions to schedule payments for them. As such, you will need to clear any pending and unlocked actions to pay your partners on time.
Find and understand your finance and billing documents
Each partnership is a legally binding agreement, so you need to carefully document your transactions, invoices, and receipts. The impact.com platform automatically generates two key invoices for your convenience:
- Partner invoices show individual invoices for each partner. You may also download a statement of invoices that summarizes all invoices for each partner.
- impact.com invoices show a breakdown of your impact.com platform fees per month or per year.
As an advertiser, you need to understand what each invoice shows. As a benefit, if you are aware of your partners’ successes, that gives you a chance to strengthen your relationships with them.
Top off your digital wallet
Finally, something as simple as topping off your digital wallet can help you ensure timely payouts and fee payments. Because banks usually don’t process deposits immediately, it’s important to have some means in your digital wallet. Remember that timely transactions play a crucial role in establishing trust and credibility with your partners.
Plan a funding strategy
Advertisers with new partnership programs often choose between three funding strategies for your program:
- Net 30 (PRF) refers to the budget projections you made before you’ve approved all payments. This strategy works best if your projections align with your actual spending and you like to top off your account before processing payments.
- Net 45 (SOI) allows you to generate partner invoices for periods over 30 days. You can fund your account after you see all the invoices.
- Net 45+ (SOI) is similar to 45 (SOI) but works best when you need more than two weeks to settle your invoices and like to auto-schedule your payouts on a regular basis (i.e., on the third day of every month).
Advertisers set up their funding strategy along with other general financial settings. You can change your funding strategy later, but the change may affect your ongoing contracts with partners.
Double-check your basic general finance settings
The finance settings within impact.com allow advertisers to assign financial contacts, set invoices, and default automatic payment settings. Although you will be able to adjust these for individual partnerships, check that your basic financial settings are in order for a more efficient setup within each partnership.
Although budgeting and financial setup may seem like a daunting task, it’s a crucial step for a successful partnership program launch. impact.com automatically generates the critical documentation and processes payouts based on your approval but doesn’t require a dedicated accounting team.
Want to set up your program’s billing correctly? Check out these guides:
- Finance explained for brands — a closer look at financing and best funding strategies
- How the digital wallet works — what is a digital wallet and how funds are credited to it and debited from it
- Deposit funds into your account — learn which payment methods are accepted and decide which works best for you.
- Invoices explained for brands — the differences between impact.com invoices, partner invoices, and statement of invoices (partner statement summary)
- iimpact.com fees explained for brands — understanding the different types of fees that appear on your invoices.
- Finance settings overview — get your invoice settings dialed by assigning a primary finance contact and choosing how you will fund your account.
- Understanding the action life cycle — get a good grasp on action locking cadence and when partners will be paid out.
