Finance Explained for Brands
Use this guide to understand how finance and billing work on impact.com. We recommend that everyone on your team read it for a high-level understanding of impact.com's finance system.
Your funding account
Your impact.com brand account has a funding account into which you deposit funds to cover:
impact.com fees — the SaaS fees you owe impact.com for using the platform and its services
Partner payments — the payments you owe partners for promoting your brand, such as commissions, bonuses, and paid placements.
impact.com's settlement engine distributes the funds in your funding account to partners, but offers no credit or loan services. To pay partners, you must deposit sufficient funds into your funding account.
Note: There are certain holidays that could affect payment processing, view our Payment Processing Schedule & Holidays Reference for more details.
Understand how your funding account is used to settle costs
impact.com utilizes a consolidated account balance system. When you make a payment against an invoice, those funds are not "locked" or tied to that specific invoice. Instead, your payment simply tops up your general Available Balance.
Because deposits fund a single, unified balance, the system automatically pays off expenses on a first-come, first-served basis as they come due. The system does not match specific deposits to specific invoices; it simply checks if there is enough money in your Available Balance to cover the next cost in line.
This means a deposit intended for a specific partner invoice might automatically be settled to cover:
Platform/Tech Fees
Immediate Transfers
Bonuses
Other older, outstanding balances
If these fees come due before your intended partner payout date, the system will pull from your Available Balance to cover them first. If your balance runs dry, the intended partner invoice may remain unpaid until additional funds are added. See the Cash Flow History Report to check whether impact.com has received your funds, confirm if your partners have been paid, and to get a detailed breakdown of your funding account activity.
Note: If platform fees are overdue, any new deposits will first be redirected to settle those fees. Settlements take place from the oldest due fees, and then from the largest due fees to the smallest for a particular due date.
impact.com fees & payments explained
When you sign up with impact.com, the contract stipulates an amount due for platform use and the products you’re using. These fees are deducted directly from your funding account when due, and take priority over all other payments.
If your expenses exceed your funding account amount, or you're late funding your account for any reason, unpaid partner payouts will be considered overdue. Your next deposit will then attempt to cover impact.com fees and overdue partner payments first. impact.com doesn't allow you to match specific funding account payments with specific invoices; your oldest overdue payments will always be covered before more recent payments, and your impact.com fees always take priority over everything else.
Be sure to choose a funding strategy that's compatible with your contract. To learn more, read about aligning contract terms to finance settings. If you already have a funding strategy in mind, reach out to support or speak with your CSM (or OPM) to discuss how you can implement it.
Best practices
impact.com's most successful brand programs do the following:
Follow your funding strategy — fund your account according to whichever strategy it's set up on, either invoice-based (SOI) or pre-funding (PRF). Keep a running balance appropriate to that strategy's due dates.
Cover everything — fund your account at the end of an activity month with the full amount to cover all tracked activity that occurred. This ensures faster turnaround time for partner payouts and more successful partnerships.
Forecast — to consistently maintain a healthy account balance, keep an eye on forecasted payments coming due. Read about the Upcoming Partner Payments Report for more information.
Overview of documents & invoices
impact.com generates 4 main finance documents for your account:
impact.com generates an invoice for your account that details the SaaS fees that are owed on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, depending on the contract you signed with impact.com. Make sure that these platform fees are accounted for when determining your budget and funding strategies, as impact.com fees take priority over all other payments and are withdrawn directly from your funding account. For more information, see impact.com Invoices.
Once a month, impact.com generates an individual invoice for each of the partners to whom you owe payouts, containing details of all the commissions due to them. Sometimes you will receive more than 1 invoice for a particular partner in a given month, and this is because the underlying transactions have different due dates. For more information, see Partner Invoices Explained for Brands.
If indirect tax applies and the invoice is prepared in a different currency, the invoice will reflect the amounts in the local tax jurisdiction currency of the applicable tax jurisdiction. Invoices will automatically display the net, tax, and total amounts in the local currency. The invoice will also state the specific latest exchange rate used for the conversion at the time of generation to ensure full tax transparency.
The Statement of Invoices (SOI) is a document generated each calendar month, containing a high-level summary of all the invoices generated for partner payments. If you work with a large number of partners, this document collects all commissions due from individual invoices. However, the SOI itself is not an invoice. For more information, see Understand the SOI and PRF Documents.
The Payment Request Form (PRF) is a document that predicts and summarizes payments due in the upcoming month. If you employ a pre-funding strategy, this document will help you estimate the total amount you’ll need to fund your account. This document can be configured to include a funding margin percentage. impact.com recommends configuring this value only after a few billing cycles to ensure that you don’t accidentally underfund your account. For more information, see Understand the SOI and PRF Documents.
Useful links
Choose a funding strategy that works for your program.
Deposit funds into your account so that you can begin paying out to partners.
Manage your impact.com fees and partner fees document settings so that you don't miss a payment notification.
Monitor upcoming payments to stay ahead of payments due.
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