What does each commission status mean?

Every commission sits in one of seven statuses: pending, trial period, approved, paid, rejected, refunded, or held. The status tells you whether the commission is still yours to decide on, already owed to the affiliate, or closed for good. Three of the seven cannot be changed by hand.

The seven statuses

Pending. The sale tracked, the commission was calculated, and it is waiting for your review. Nothing is owed yet. Almost every commission starts here.

Trial period. A Stripe or Polar subscription that began on a free trial. No money has moved, so the sale is recorded at zero and the commission is zero. When the first real payment succeeds, LinkJolt fills in the real amount and commission and the row becomes pending. Approve and Reject appear when you open a commission that has reached pending.

Approved. You accepted the commission and it is now owed to the affiliate. With auto-payout switched on, approving is also what queues the payment.

Paid. A payout was sent, or you used Mark as Paid to record a payment you made yourself. Mark as Paid only works on an approved commission.

Rejected. You declined it, or the rule based fraud checks flagged the sale, for example when the customer's email is the affiliate's own email address. While a commission is rejected it is never paid and does not count toward what you owe.

Refunded. The sale was refunded or charged back and the commission was reversed to match. A full reversal takes the commission to zero and sets this status. A partial refund behaves differently: the status stays as it was and the commission is reduced, so the remaining part is still payable.

Held. The sale went past your plan's tracked sales limit. See below.

Which ones you can still change

Pending, trial period, approved and rejected can all still be changed. Rejected is the one people assume is final and it is not: if a flagged sale is genuine, open the commission and use Approve anyway. It then behaves like any other.

Paid, refunded and held refuse every manual change and tell you why. Re-approving a paid commission would queue a second real payment. Re-approving a refunded one would hide a refund that actually happened. Approving a held one would step around your plan limit.

With auto-payout on (Professional and Ultimate, off by default), approving is not bookkeeping. It queues a real payment that the daily payout run sends about 24 hours later. Check the rows before you bulk approve.

Held, explained properly

Below Scale, every plan has a tracked sales limit for each billing period: $5,000 on Starter, $25,000 on Professional, $50,000 on Ultimate. You get a notification, and the account owner gets an email, at 80 percent of the limit and again once the limit is passed.

What happens to sales past the limit depends on where they come from. Sales arriving through Stripe Checkout, Stripe one-off charges, Polar, WooCommerce or Apple in-app purchases are still recorded in full, with the commission calculated, and marked held. On Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, GoPay and Stripe subscription renewals, an over-limit sale is not recorded at all, so there is nothing to release later.

Held sales do not add to campaign revenue, they are left out of your affiliate's earnings totals, and their commission cannot be approved by hand. Moving to a plan whose limit covers that period's tracked sales releases the held sales from the current billing period back to pending. Held sales from earlier billing periods stay held, so upgrade inside the period that matters.

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