How automatic payouts work, and what the processing fee is

Automatic payouts pay your approved commissions without you clicking anything. It is a Professional, Ultimate and Scale feature, and it stays off until you turn it on.

How the money actually moves

LinkJolt never holds your funds. Each automatic payout is a charge followed by a transfer:

1. Your saved payment method is charged for the payout amount plus the processing fee.
2. Stripe moves the payout amount out of that charge to the affiliate's connected payout account.

You do not connect a Stripe account to pay affiliates: funding is a card you already have on file. Only your affiliates connect an account, and that is how they receive the transfer.

Turning it on

1. Open Payouts in the sidebar and go to the Settings tab.
2. On the "Stripe payouts" card, press "Accept and enable". The account owner, or a team member with the payout permission, can do this.
3. Switch on "Enable Automatic Payouts" just below.

That card names the exact card that will be charged, resolved by the same code that runs the charge. "Change" lets you pick a different payout card or add one. Accepting the terms schedules nothing on its own: your card is charged only when an automatic payout runs, or when you pay a commission yourself from the Pay affiliates view on the Payouts page.

The timing

1. You approve a commission. It becomes due for payment 24 hours later.
2. The payout job runs once a day at midnight UTC and works through what is due, oldest first.
3. When the transfer succeeds, the commission flips to paid.

Since the wait is a full 24 hours and the job runs once a day, expect payment one to two days after approval.

With automatic payouts on, approving a commission is not bookkeeping, it queues real money against your card. Moving a commission back out of approved before the run cancels the queued payout.

What the processing fee is

The fee is 2.9% of the payout plus a fixed 0.30 in the payout currency, so 30 cents on a payout in US dollars. That is Stripe's processing cost, passed through, and LinkJolt takes 0% on top. These charges end with PAYOUT on your card statement, so they are easy to spot next to your subscription.

The automatic rail charges each commission separately, so the fixed 0.30 applies once per commission paid. Many small commissions carry many fixed fees. Paying from the Pay affiliates view instead groups one affiliate's commissions in a currency into a single charge with a single fixed fee.

When a payout does not go through

Some payouts hold and retry daily, then resume once the blocker clears: no usable payout card on file, an affiliate who has not connected a payout account, or one whose account is not ready to receive transfers yet. You are notified, and so is the affiliate when the missing step is theirs.

A declined card stops that payout instead of retrying, and the notification tells you why.

Others are cancelled because they can never succeed automatically: commissions in a currency other than GBP, USD or EUR, affiliates whose payout account is registered in a country Stripe will not let us send to, affiliates you created yourself who have no LinkJolt login, and affiliates you have since suspended or rejected. Your card is not charged in any of those cases.

Rarely, the charge goes through and the transfer then fails. The payout amount is refunded to your card, the processing fee is not, and you are notified.

The commission stays approved and payable in every one of these cases. Settle it with the CSV export in the Pay affiliates view, pay the affiliate yourself through PayPal, Wise or a bank transfer, then mark it as paid. See the help topics on approving commissions and on paying affiliates by CSV export.