Also known as: Commission Reconciliation, Payout Reconciliation
Reconciliation is the process of matching the conversions and commissions a partner recorded against the figures the broker reports, and resolving any gaps. It is the accounting check that the money paid matches the activity actually driven.
Reconciliation runs on a schedule, usually monthly, aligned with the payout cycle. The partner exports their own conversion data and lines it up against the broker's commission statement, comparing counts and values for the same period. The headline metric is the discrepancy percentage: the gap between the two figures divided by the partner's own count.
The critical discipline is granularity. A total-level match can look clean while one traffic source silently loses every conversion and another over-counts, the two errors cancelling out. Reconciling at the sub-ID or source level exposes those hidden failures. Where a real gap appears, both sides trace it, most often to a postback that failed for one source, a cookie window mismatch, or conversions the broker rejected for quality or fraud, and the broker credits any genuinely missed conversions.
Pull the partner's tracker data and the broker's statement for the same period.
Compare conversion counts and values per source, not just the total.
Divide the count gap by the partner's own figure to get the discrepancy percentage.
Investigate whether missing conversions stem from failed postbacks, attribution windows or rejections.
The broker credits genuinely missed conversions and both sides log the fix.
Why it matters for partnership: Tracking is never perfect. Postbacks fail, cookies expire, and conversions get attributed differently on each side. Regular reconciliation is how a partner catches under-payment and how a broker catches over-payment or fraud.
An affiliate's tracker shows 52 FTDs but the broker's statement shows 47. Reconciliation traces the five missing conversions to a postback that failed for one traffic source, and the broker credits them.
Reconcile monthly at the sub-ID level, not just the total. Aggregate numbers can look close while a single source silently loses every conversion.
Only reconciling the grand total, which hides source-level tracking failures that net out by coincidence.
Failed or delayed postbacks, cookie/attribution-window mismatches, and conversions rejected by the broker for quality or fraud reasons.