This guide is designed to help you understand how finance and billing works on impact.com. We recommend that everyone on your team reads it for a high-level understanding of impact.com's finance system.
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, make good payments, and paid placements.
impact.com's Global Clearing House (GCH) 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.
Please note that there are several holidays each year on which payments to partners will not be processed:
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.
Note: 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.
impact.com's most successful brand programs do the following:
Pre-fund — impact.com's system is designed for pre-funding, so the recommendation is to keep a running balance in your account from month to month.
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.
There are 4 main finance documents that impact.com generates 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.
Singaporean GST: If both you and your partner are registered for the Singaporean Goods and Services Tax (GST), contact support so it can be included in your partner invoices. This is especially important if your (or the partner's) preferred currency is not the Singaporean Dollar (SGD).
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.
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 invoice settings so that you don't miss a payment notification.
Monitor upcoming payments to stay ahead of payments due.