Every dollar, accounted for

Every share starts from net receipts: money a customer has paid and that has cleared, for one product line on an invoice, minus only these amounts tied to that line:

• Sales, use, VAT, GST or similar taxes collected for a government
• Refunds or credits actually given to the customer
• Chargebacks and dispute charges actually assessed
• Actual payment processing, subscription transaction and currency conversion charges on the Hard Fee List

Each fee is deducted once. Support, AI, hosting, monitoring, marketing, personnel, development, overhead, estimates and reserves are never deducted; FormaBase pays those from its own share.

Example: $100 of net receipts from a referred customer during a product's first 24 months pays the Affiliate $50, the Creator $10, and FormaBase $40. Without an Affiliate, the Creator receives $20 and FormaBase $80.

• A valid product-specific link credits an Affiliate when the customer first starts the paid product, if the click was within the last 30 days.
• A valid product-specific promo code entered at checkout takes priority over a link.
• One Affiliate is credited per customer and product. Self-referrals and fraudulent accounts do not count.
• A customer who already pays for a product is not a new attribution for it; a new product they buy can be.
• Cancelling and reactivating, pausing, renewals and plan changes never restart a customer's 12 months.
• Renaming a product never transfers attribution. Every correction records a reason and notifies the people affected.

Service dates decide eligibility, not payment dates. A share accrues for service delivered inside its window. Where a service period crosses the end of a Creator's 24 months, receipts are allocated by service day and only days inside the term count. A free trial does not use up an Affiliate's 12 months.

For a cleared annual prepayment, the Affiliate's full eligible first-year commission is paid in the next monthly cycle. Creator royalties accrue day by day as service is delivered and are paid monthly.

Every amount lives in one append-only ledger, stored as integer cents, never floating-point numbers. Entries are never edited or deleted: refunds, chargebacks, duplicate payments and fee corrections create new reversing entries linked to the original. Every entry records the rules version that produced it.

{
  "id": "le_8Q2W…",
  "product": "listinglens",
  "payee": { "role": "affiliate", "id": "par_3KD…" },
  "type": "affiliate_share",
  "status": "accrued",
  "amount_cents": 2364,
  "currency": "usd",
  "basis": {
    "invoice_line": "il_9Fx…",
    "net_receipts_cents": 4728,
    "rate": "0.50",
    "service_period": "2026-10-01/2026-10-31"
  },
  "rules_version": "2026-10-03",
  "reverses": null,
  "created_at": "2026-11-02T04:00:00Z"
}

Each entry moves through clearly separated states, so an estimate is never confused with money paid:

The ledger is reconciled against Stripe every night. Totals must match to the cent, including refunds, disputes and fees. Payment events are processed idempotently: each event is recorded once and repeats are ignored, so a retried notification can never double-count money.

Payees are paid monthly through Stripe Connect, which also handles payee verification and tax forms. Ordinary payout batches are reviewed before release. Every participant has a dashboard and monthly statements with line detail, and Creators can raise a question about any statement within 60 days and receive enough detail to check the calculation.

Amounts are calculated in US dollars unless a signed agreement says otherwise, and any conversion rate and charge is shown.

Terms never change underneath anyone. A Creator's approved product record fixes the rules version for its full 24 months; a customer's attribution record fixes the Affiliate's version for that customer's first 12 months. New versions come with at least 30 days' notice and apply only to products approved and customers referred after they take effect.