Payout batches and approval
A payout batch is one rule’s earnings for one period, grouped into one line per creator, waiting for you to approve it. The Payouts page is titled Payout Approvals, and it is the only place in the app where money moves.
When batches are created
For the period that has just closed, on the first day of the next one: a monthly rule on the first of the month, a quarterly rule on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October, an annual rule on 1 January. A background sweep runs hourly, so a period is picked up within an hour of opening.
Generate payouts now runs the same check on demand, under the same calendar rule. It is there to stop you waiting for the sweep, not to bypass the calendar, so on the tenth of the month it will tell you there is nothing new to batch.
Pay out current period early is the deliberate exception. It batches what the open period has earned so far. Read the confirmation: anything that accrues afterwards forms a later batch of the same period and is not lost, but a refund recorded after the money has gone cannot be reversed.
An agreement’s when to start running payouts setting can hold batching back to a date. Earnings before that date still accrue; they simply are not batched automatically.
What is in a batch
Only rows that are payable and not already claimed. Specifically:
- Rows not already linked to another batch line. A ledger row is claimed by exactly one batch line, which is what makes paying twice impossible no matter how many batches a period accumulates.
- Rows not imported as already settled elsewhere.
- Creators whose total for the period is positive. A creator who nets out negative is left unbatched rather than dropped, so the negative nets against whatever they earn next.
One period can hold more than one batch over its life: the first one, and then later ones for rows that arrived after it was cut. Only one of them can be in flight at a time, so you are never asked to approve the same period twice at once.
Statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending approval | Assembled, waiting for you. Nothing has moved. |
| Approved | You have approved it. Still nothing has moved. |
| Processing | Submitted to PayPal, waiting on the outcome of each item. |
| Paid | Every line confirmed paid. |
| Partially paid | Some lines succeeded, some did not. |
| Failed | No line succeeded. |
| Rejected | You rejected it. |
Approving and sending are two steps
Approving a batch commits you to the figures. It does not send anything. Send Approved Payouts is the step that hands the money to PayPal, and it asks for confirmation of the total first.
Approve All Pending clears the queue in one action, and Review on any line shows the ledger rows behind it before you decide. While a batch is still pending approval you can adjust a line’s earned amount with a reason; see refunds, edits and balances.
Rejecting a batch is not a dead end. On a rejected batch, Release entries empties it and returns its rows to the pool so a later batch picks them up, and Re-approve puts the batch back into the queue after all.
Settling by hand
Not everything goes through PayPal. A creator whose payout method is manual is left out of the send entirely and their line is settled with Mark as paid on the batch drill-down, recording the payment date and a reference.
Record payment on the Payouts page covers money paid outside a batch altogether, including payments made before you installed the app. It asks for the creator, an optional agreement, a date, an amount, a method and a reference, and shows what is currently owed as you fill it in. Recorded payments are applied to that creator’s oldest unpaid periods first.
History and export
Payout History lists settled batches, and payout data exports as CSV alongside the ledger. Both downloads happen in place, without leaving the Shopify admin.