The Payout Pipeline
A payout in Earnest represents the commission a rep earns for a specific time period. This article walks through the full lifecycle — generating drafts, regenerating them when data changes, clearing the publish gates, and finalizing statements.
Related: Review, Approvals & Disputes covers the approval queue, and Corrections & Clawbacks covers fixing a period that is already published.
Payout lifecycle
No Payout → DRAFT → PUBLISHED
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| No Payout | No payout record exists for this period yet. Commission is calculated live on the rep's dashboard, but nothing is locked in. |
| Draft | A payout record has been generated. The math is captured and can still be regenerated or adjusted. Reps do not receive a statement yet. |
| Published | Finalized and locked. The rep is notified, and the amount, plan snapshot and exchange rates are frozen. |
Published payouts are immutable. Earnest blocks reverting PUBLISHED back to DRAFT outright: "Cannot revert a PUBLISHED payout to DRAFT. Published payouts are final - the rep has already been notified." Corrections are posted forward instead — see Corrections & Clawbacks.
Step 1 — Select the period
Go to Admin → Payouts and pick the month (or quarter). Reps are grouped by status: No Payout, Draft, and Published.
You cannot draft payouts for a future month — the Draft button is disabled until the month begins.
Step 2 — Generate drafts
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Draft All Payouts (n) | Generates drafts for every rep who does not have one yet. |
| Draft Selected (n) | Same, limited to the reps you tick. |
Drafting runs the commission engine for each rep and creates a payout record that captures:
- The calculated gross earnings and final payout.
- A plan snapshot — a frozen copy of the plan version's tiers, ramp steps, cap, floor and resolved quota at that moment.
- Any required currency conversions, with the exchange rates locked in.
- Links to any approved adjustments for the period.
- For RATIO plans, the resolved FTE denominator and whether it was derived or overridden.
- Any recoverable balance carried in from the rep's prior period.
Drafting is idempotent — a rep who already has a payout for the period is skipped rather than duplicated.
Step 3 — Review and adjust
Open a rep's row for the full breakdown: revenue, attainment, tier calculations, bonuses and adjustments.
Adjustments come in two types:
| Type | How it works |
|---|---|
| Revenue Adjustment | Added to the rep's total revenue before commission is calculated, so it flows through the tier schedule and changes attainment. Denominated in the rep's quota currency. |
| Fixed Bonus | A flat amount added directly to the final payout, bypassing the commission formula. Denominated in the rep's payout currency. |
Every adjustment requires a reason. Admin-created adjustments are approved immediately; adjustments submitted by a manager enter a review queue first, and expire if left unreviewed — see Review, Approvals & Disputes.
A rep's manager can also record a review sign-off on a draft. It is informational, never blocks publishing, and is cleared if the draft is regenerated.
Step 4 — Regenerate when the data changes
If activities, credit splits or adjustments changed after a draft was generated, the draft is stale. Use Regenerate All (or regenerate a single rep from their detail page) to recompute. You do not need to delete the draft first — regeneration deletes and recreates the record atomically under the same id.
Two behaviours worth knowing:
- Regenerating clears the manager review sign-off, because the numbers the manager signed off on no longer exist.
- A period is skipped with a warning if a later period already carries a recoverable balance that chains from it: "a later period carries a recoverable balance that chains from this one. Delete the later period(s) and regenerate from this period forward." Recomputing out of order would break the balance chain.
Step 5 — Publish
Publish All finalizes every draft for the period. Individual payouts can be published from their detail page.
Publishing is gated. Some gates ask you to confirm; others block until you fix the cause.
Gates that ask you to confirm
| Gate | When it fires |
|---|---|
| Early publish | The period has not ended yet. "This period ends on . Publishing now finalizes it early — activities booked after today won't be included." |
| FX fallback | A conversion had to fall back rather than use a current rate. |
| Anomalies | The pre-publish scan flagged something unusual (below). |
The anomaly scan
Before publishing, Earnest compares each draft against the rep's own history and flags:
| Reason | Rule |
|---|---|
| negative | The payout is below zero. |
| zero_active | An active rep is being paid nothing. |
| spike | More than 3× the average of the rep's last 3 published payouts. |
| swing | More than ±50% against the rep's most recent published payout. |
| org swing | The org's draft total moves more than ±30% against last month's published total. |
Spike and swing are suppressed below 500 in your base currency, so small numbers moving around do not generate noise. Flagged payouts are listed most-severe first and require an explicit acknowledgement.
Gates that block
| Hold | What it means | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Preceding quarter draft | An earlier draft in the same quarter is still unpublished. | Publish that one first. |
| Activities added after generation | New activities landed in the period after the draft was made. | Regenerate, then publish. |
| Approved adjustments added after generation | An adjustment was created or approved after the draft was made. | Regenerate, then publish. |
| Credit splits changed | Split credits on the period's activities were rewritten after generation. | Regenerate, then publish. |
| Inputs deleted or changed | An activity in the period was deleted or edited after generation. | Regenerate, then publish. |
| Activities outside the position window | Activities fall outside the rep's position dates and can never be paid — regenerating will not help. | Extend the rep's position to cover them, or remove the activities. |
Each of these exists for one reason: publishing freezes the number, so a draft whose inputs moved would permanently pay the wrong amount.
Publishing then:
- Sets the status to PUBLISHED, with the timestamp and the approving admin.
- Marks the period's activities as published.
- Writes an audit event per payout.
- Sends rep notifications after the transaction commits.
Step 6 — Notifications
If Payout Email Notifications are on for your org, each rep receives an email with their Commission Statement PDF attached. Reps can opt out individually in their own settings; the in-app notification is always delivered regardless.
Emails are dispatched after the publish transaction commits, so a rep is never told about a payout that rolled back. For large teams delivery may take a few minutes.
Exports
From the payouts page:
| Export | Contents |
|---|---|
| Payroll export | Rep name and email, payout amount in their payout currency, the base-currency equivalent, and period dates. Built to hand to payroll. |
| Statements (PDF) | Every statement for the period as PDFs. |
| Statements (CSV) | The same figures in tabular form. |
Deleting drafts
Delete All removes the period's drafts and unlinks their adjustments and activities, returning them to the unpaid pool. Only drafts can be deleted — published payouts cannot.
The plan snapshot
Every payout freezes the plan configuration it was generated against. This means:
- Editing a plan later never changes an existing payout.
- A historical payout can always be audited against the exact rules in force at the time.
- The statement PDF is rendered from the snapshot.
- The snapshot is also what a recompute correction replays against, which is why corrections stay exact through accelerators and caps.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Can I un-publish a payout? No — and you do not need to. Use a recompute correction, which replays the corrected figure through the published period's frozen snapshot and posts the exact commission delta forward into an open period. See Corrections & Clawbacks.
Q: What happens if activities change after I generate drafts? The draft is held at publish time with a message naming the cause. Click Regenerate All to recompute, then publish. You no longer need to delete drafts first.
Q: Can I publish before the period ends? Yes, with an explicit confirmation. Both the single and bulk paths raise the same early-publish gate — the bulk path re-checks each payout individually, so a quarterly payout inside a monthly batch is still caught.
Q: Are reps notified when a draft is created? No. Notifications are only sent on publish.
Q: What if a rep has no activities for the period? A payout is still generated, at zero commission — or at the guaranteed draw if they are on a ramp step that includes one. This keeps a complete audit trail for every period.
Q: How do quarterly payouts work? For a plan with quarterly frequency the period spans three months and produces a single payout. Note that a quarterly payout's period start is the quarter's first month — the publish gates anchor on the period end so a quarter is never finalized early by accident.
Q: Why was my draft skipped during regeneration? Most likely a later period already carries a recoverable balance chaining from this one. Delete the later periods and regenerate forward from this one so the balance chain rebuilds in order.