Approving and rejecting commissions

Commissions are never approved for you. Every tracked sale lands on the Commissions page as Pending, and it becomes payable only when you approve it. It is the daily money control in LinkJolt, so it is worth knowing what each button does.

Where it lives

Open Commissions in your merchant dashboard. It opens on the Commissions tab, the full ledger, with four totals across the top: Pending, Approved, Paid and Rejected. The second tab, Payout activity, shows queued and recent payouts rather than approvals.

The brand owner can always approve and reject. A team member needs payout permission, otherwise the change is refused.

Approving one at a time

Click a row to open its details. You get the sale amount, the commission amount, the customer, the affiliate and the campaign, so you can check the sale before you pay for it.

Approve and Reject appear on Pending rows. A free-trial sale sits at Trial Period instead, and that row carries no buttons in the details view: tick its checkbox and use the selection bar described below.

Approving in bulk

1. Search or filter the table down to what you want to review, one affiliate or one campaign say.
2. Tick the rows you want, or use the checkbox in the table header. That header checkbox selects every row matching your current filter, not just the page in front of you.
3. A bar appears showing how many rows are selected and the total, kept separate per currency rather than added together.
4. Choose Approve, Reject, or Pay approved, which stays greyed out until your selection contains approved rows.

A confirmation comes first, stating the count, the total and what happens next. Only Pending and Trial Period rows can be approved or rejected in bulk. Anything else in your selection is skipped, and the confirmation tells you how many before you continue.

With auto-payouts switched on, approving is not bookkeeping. Each approved commission is queued and charged to your saved payment method about 24 hours later. Check the amount before you bulk approve. Auto-payouts are a Professional and Ultimate setting, off until you switch them on, and the account owner has to accept the payout terms first. With them off, approving only marks the commission payable, and you pay when you are ready from the Pay affiliates button or a CSV export.

What rejecting does

Rejecting marks the commission Rejected and not payable, so the affiliate is not paid for that sale. If a payout was queued but has not started sending, it is cancelled at the same time, so a rejected sale cannot slip through. One that is already sending cannot be pulled back.

Rejection is reversible. Open the row and use Approve anyway. LinkJolt asks you to confirm, because the sale may have been flagged automatically as a possible self-referral, the customer's email matching the affiliate's own for instance, rather than rejected by a person. See "How does LinkJolt detect affiliate fraud and self-referrals?".

Rows you cannot change by hand

Three statuses offer no Approve or Reject, and LinkJolt refuses the change on the server as well:

• Refunded is final. The sale was refunded and the commission already reversed, so re-approving it would hide the refund.
• Held means the sale went over your plan's monthly tracked-sales limit. Moving to a plan whose limit covers that month releases that month's held sales back to Pending, where you approve them normally.
• Paid cannot be re-approved, rejected or set back to Pending. The money has already moved, and approving again would queue a second payout.

For what happens after approval, see "When and how do affiliates actually get paid?". For the refund case, see "What happens to an affiliate's commission when a sale is refunded?".