This article is the key to understanding financial management within your Adserver.Online account. Here we cover such topics as billing, incoming payments, payouts, user's 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. Basically, they represent the history of users' balance changes. Thus, users' balance equals the sum of all incoming transactions minus all outgoing transactions.

Therefore, transactions give you the full picture of what your users' balance looks like at any time.

Transaction types

  • 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.other IN – incoming transaction for balance correction
  • Adv.other OUT – outgoing transaction for balance correction
  • Revenue – incoming transaction, revenue generated by publishers
  • Payout – outgoing transaction, taking funds out of a publishers 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 what may turn out to 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 with the ability to edit them. While users are allowed to see their own transactions in read-only mode.

Basically, finances can be managed through manually created transactions. But sometimes it can be time-consuming. Especially when there're lots of users you need to handle.

Automatic billing

Automatic billing is a way to automatically generate transactions 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 time zone).

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 fraud 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

In order to activate payouts, the owner should set the minimum payout amount in the Settings section. After that, both the owner and publishers will have a Finance/Payouts tab activated on the menu.

Publishers can send payout requests with a specified payout amount. The value should not exceed the amount available for payout. The amount available for payout is equal to the sum of all Revenue transactions minus all Payout transactions. It's necessary to keep in mind that users should have the Payment information field on their profiles completed.

Successful payout request results in a notification received by the Owner. He should make a money transfer 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's balance 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.

For enterprise-grade customers, we can set up automated payouts generation (e.g. NET7). Please contact support if you are interested in this feature.

Advertiser payments

Owners and Advertisers both have a Finance/Payments section. By default, Advertisers cannot create payments in the system. Firstly, they should request payment details from the Owner via the feedback form, email, etc. The Owner can fill in the payment information field in the Settings. This information will become available in the Finance/Payments section.

Once the Owner receives the payment from the Advertiser, he should create a new payment in the Finance/Payments section and set its status to 'Completed'. As a result, a Deposit transaction will be created and the user's balance updated accordingly.

Besides, Adserver.Online offers integration with external payment systems. With this option, advertisers are able to complete payments automatically through third-party payment systems. Currently, Adserver.Online supports the following gateways:

In order to implement such integration, the account owner should configure gateways in the Settings / Payment gateways menu. You need to obtain Appropriate API keys prior to gateway configuration.

Account balance control

You can enjoy additional control over your advertiser's balance in real-time with overspend prevention. 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 options 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, 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. 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 you want in the Settings / Common / Finance options menu. Please note, Adserver.Online doesn't support multicurrency accounts.

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 reach us if you have any questions.