This article is the key to understanding financial management within your Adserver.Online account. Here, we cover topics such as billing, incoming payments, payouts, user account balance control, and payment systems integration.
Terms and Definitions
- Server – an advertising server running on Adserver.Online platform
- Owner – the server administrator
- User – a user created by the owner or registered independently. Users can have the following roles: publisher and advertiser.
Transactions
Transactions form the core of the financial management system of your Adserver.Online account. They represent the history of user balance changes. Thus, the user balance equals the sum of all incoming transactions minus all outgoing transactions.
Therefore, transactions give you the complete picture of your user balance at the time.
Transaction Types
Related to advertiser balance
- Deposit – incoming transaction to advertisers' account (i.e., a payment)
- Billing – outgoing transaction, payment for advertising services
- Refund – outgoing transaction, money paid back to an advertiser
- Adv. reward – incoming transaction for referral program reward
- Adv.other IN – incoming transaction for balance correction
- Adv.other OUT – outgoing transaction for balance correction
Related to publisher balance
- Revenue – incoming transaction, revenue generated by publishers
- Payout – outgoing transaction, taking funds out of a publisher account
- Pub. reward – incoming transaction for referral program reward
- Pub.other IN – incoming transaction for balance correction
- Pub.other OUT – outgoing transaction for balance correction
The Owner can perform financial management by himself and manually create transactions in the system. However, the Server can create such transactions automatically, which may be more effective. Transaction management is available via the Finance/Transactions menu. This menu is available to both owners and users (publishers and advertisers), with owners seeing all the transactions and having the ability to edit them. At the same time, users can see their transactions in read-only mode.
Basically, finances can be managed through manually created transactions. But sometimes, it can be time-consuming, especially when handling many users.
Automatic Billing
Automatic billing is a way to generate transactions automatically based on advertising statistics.
The billing process starts once a day. It creates Revenue and Billing transactions for Publishers and Advertisers according to the statistics from the previous day (UTC timezone).
The billing process works separately from the stats. Therefore, the impressions number in statistics cannot be changed. Nevertheless, it is possible to create additional transactions if needed. For example, in case you wish to penalize your Publishers for sending fraudulent traffic or cheating in any way,
Automatic billing is turned off by default. You can activate it in the Settings / Common / Finance menu.
Publisher Payouts
To activate payout functionality, the owner should enable payouts and set the minimum payout amount in the Settings / Common / Publisher menu. After that, the owner and publishers will have a Finance/Payouts tab on the menu.
Publishers can send payout requests with a specified payout amount. Manual requests can be disabled in the Settings.
The requested amount must not exceed the amount available for payout, which equals the sum of all Revenue transactions minus all Payout transactions. Users should have the Payout information field completed on their profiles.
A successful payout request results in a notification received by the owner. He should transfer money to the publisher and then set the status of the corresponding payout to Completed. As a result, a Payout transaction will be created, and the user balance will be updated accordingly.
The owner can export the list of payouts for easy processing in CSV, XLS, etc.
Payout methods are available in the publisher's profile and can be configured in the Settings / Payout methods menu.
Automated Payouts
When you have a lot of publishers, making regular payouts is a time-consuming job.
To partially automate the process, you can enable auto-payouts by selecting one of the periods (Monthly, Weekly, BiWeekly) in the Settings / Common / Publisher section.
After that, the system will start automatically creating a pending payout. However, you will still need to manually transfer the money to the publisher's bank account and then confirm the payout in the system.
Advertiser Payments
Advertisers must have some funds on their balances to run ads. So they have to make payments.
Payments are not automated by default, meaning payment processing is manual and offline.
The owner can fill in the payment information field in the Settings, or use Offline gateway (see below), or provide it to advertisers upon request via a feedback form.
Once the owner receives the payment from the advertiser, he should create a new payment in the Finance/Payments menu and set its status to 'Completed'. As a result, a Deposit transaction will be created, and the user's balance will be updated accordingly.
To automate payments, Adserver.Online offers integration with many popular payment systems, including one accepting cryptocurrencies. This option allows advertisers to complete payments fully automatically through third-party payment systems.
The owner should configure gateways in the Settings / Payment gateways menu to implement such integration. Before gateway configuration, you need to obtain appropriate API keys.
We also support an "Offline" gateway, which is just a text field where you can enter, for example, your bank details or third-party JS/HTML codes.
Balance Control
With overspending prevention, you can enable control over your advertiser's balance in real-time. Therefore, you may use this feature to prevent your advertisers' from spending more than they have on their balance.
Please note balance control is disabled by default. You can enable it in the Settings / Common / Advertiser menu.
The following two features are available to owners only via the 'Users' menu:
- Disable balance control – available only when the balance controls feature is enabled. Disables balance control for a certain user. Therefore, it allows this user to have a negative balance. Low balance alerts won't be sent out.
- Exclude from automatic billing – available only when the automatic billing feature is enabled. It disables automatic billing for a certain user. Therefore, the system won't create transactions for this particular user.
Currency
Adserver.Online uses USD as the default currency. But you can set any currency in the Settings / Common / Finance menu.
Please note Adserver.Online doesn't support multicurrency accounts. However, we support muti-currency bidding with automatic currency conversion.
Invoicing
Adserver.Online offers basic invoicing for advertisers.
To configure invoice generation, first, switch the owner account to the Company type in the Profile menu and fill in the company details.
After that, you must switch a user to Company, fill in the details, and specify the VAT percentage if applicable.
You and an advertiser can see and download a PDF invoice in the Finance / Payments menu.
Financial management – summary
Here, we have covered the most essential topics on financial management features Adserver.Online has to offer. Make sure you read the article carefully. Please remember you can always use our contact form to contact us if you have any questions.