Is your referral credit paying off?

When you give a referred customer store credit, or pay a partner in credit, you are spending money you haven't received. The Profitability page answers one question: after that credit was used, did those people pay you real money, and was it enough to cover what the credit cost?

Find it in the left-hand menu. Until you have given some credit, it shows a prompt to set up a reward.

The headline

At the top of the page, one sentence sums it up, for example:

Credit you gave returned 3.4×: $1,360 profit on $400 of credit.

That means each dollar of credit you gave came back as $3.40 of profit, counting only the real money people paid after they got the credit. Below it:

• Credit cost is what the credit cost you.

• Real money after is the cash customers paid after receiving credit.

• Profit is that cash at your margin.

• ROI is profit divided by credit cost.

• Paid back is the share of credit that has earned back its cost.

Use the filters to change the period, program, partner, attribution window or currency. Amounts in different currencies are never added together as one number.

The Payback chart shows each month's credit and how much of it has paid back so far. The page also tells you the median time it took: "Credit that paid back took a median of 40 days."

Cash is real money, credit is not

Imagine a customer with $10 of credit who buys a $24 plan. $10 of that payment was covered by credit. You collected $14. Only the $14 counts as real money.

This is the most important rule on the page. A payment covered by credit is not revenue, so Referalli never counts it. If it did, a customer who only ever spent free credit would look like a success.

To tell cash from credit, Referalli needs to know how much credit each payment used. Stripe tells it automatically. For some other platforms it has to guess, and when it does, the numbers are labelled as based on an assumption. Reporting payments, credit and costs lists what each platform reports and how to fill the gaps.

Set your margin

Revenue is not profit. A $14 payment at a 60% margin earns you $8.40. Tell Referalli your margin so it can compute profit.

If you haven't set a margin, profit is unknown, not zero. The headline then reads "Set your margin to see profit," and shows only the real money after credit. Referalli does not assume a margin for you, because a made-up margin would make the ROI figure look more certain than it is.

Select Set your margin on the Profitability page, or open Settings → Credit ROI, and fill in Default margin (%) (your profit on each payment, such as 40 or 37.5). If some of what you sell is more profitable than the rest, add a margin or a unit cost per product under Product margins on the same screen (Add product, with the Product ID exactly as your billing provider sends it). A product's margin overrides the default.

Referalli also has to decide what credit itself costs you. Under What credit costs you, the default is Its full value ($10 of credit costs $10), which is the cautious choice. If your margin is 60%, $10 of store credit spent on your own products really cost you about $4. What it costs you to deliver counts it that way, and A fixed share of its value lets you pick a percentage.

The same screen has the other choices that shape the numbers:

• Reporting currency: the currency every combined figure is shown in. Other currencies are converted with your exchange rates.

• When your billing provider doesn't say credit was used: Assume the next payments used it (the default), Only count what the provider reports, or Count it as used when it's given.

• Attribution window and Churn window (days): how long after a referral its payments count, and how long without payments counts as gone.

• Count the referrer's own spending and Take tax and fees off profit.

• Cost to serve a customer per month, which comes off profit for each month a referred customer pays.

Select Save settings to apply a change. Past referrals keep their old numbers until you select Rebuild numbers, which applies your current settings to them. It shows its progress, and your settings are saved either way.

Credit given to customers and to partners

Credit goes to two kinds of people, and the page tracks both:

• Referred customers get credit to try you. After it ran out, did they keep paying real money?

• Partners may be paid commission as store credit instead of cash. Did they ever spend real money themselves, or just collect?

Credit given to a referred customer costs you when they use it. Credit paid to a partner as commission costs you when you pay it, the same as a cash commission, because most partners can't be linked to what they spend. Cash commissions are also a cost of a referral and are counted in the partner view.

Patterns to watch

The Patterns tab names four ways credit fails to pay off. Each waits until there is enough evidence, so a customer who got credit yesterday is never flagged.

• Credit only: the customer used their credit and never paid real money beyond it.

• Churn when credit ran out: the customer paid real money for a while, then stopped soon after their credit was gone. The default is 30 days.

• Bonus collectors: partners who earned credit and never paid you anything themselves. A partner is only checked if you've linked them to their own customer id, because otherwise their spending can't be known.

• Losing partners: partners whose referrals cost you more than they brought in.

A pattern is a reason to look, not a verdict. Referalli never removes a partner or changes a program on its own. For each match you can open a review, which creates a case in fraud review for you to decide.

If you want patterns to count against a partner's quality score, set Use ROI patterns in partner quality in Settings → Credit ROI to Low, Medium or High. It is Off by default.

Trace one person

On the Profitability page, select a row in the Credit tab or the By partner tab to open its trace. You can also select Credit ROI on a referral's or a partner's page. The trace shows their story in time order: the credit they were given, when they used it, each payment, and each cost, with a running total that shows the moment the credit paid back. It's the fastest way to understand why a number is what it is, or to check that a payment was counted correctly. On a partner it also includes their commissions, which the running total leaves out.

The open trace is part of the page address (?trace= for a customer, ?tracePartner= for a partner), so you can copy the link and share it with a colleague.

If you haven't set a margin, the running total shows "Needs a margin to tell" instead of inventing one.

How complete is the data?

The Data quality tab says how much of your data is complete, for example "62% of payments report credit applied; margin set for 3 of 5 products." Each gap comes with a fix:

• Margin missing: set a default margin, or add the products.

• Credit applied unreported: connect billing that reports credit, or map the credit field. In Settings → Billing providers, open a connection's menu and select Map credit fields. You tell Referalli where cash, credit, discount, cost and product sit in that provider's events, and paste a sample event to check what it picks up before you save. Nothing is saved by the check.

• Partners not linked: link each partner to their own customer id so their spending counts.

• Exchange rate missing: add a rate so other currencies are included.

Fix the largest gap first. A figure built on guesses is shown as an estimate, never as exact.

Projections are estimates

Credit given recently has not had time to pay back. Once you have enough history (at least 50 finished grants in the same program and side), the page can project how much of your open credit is likely to pay back and when, based on how similar credit behaved. These figures are labelled projection. They are expectations, not results, and they are never mixed into the actual numbers.

Set a Target ROI (×) in Settings → Credit ROI: 2.0 means every 1 of credit should bring back 2 of profit. Programs below it are flagged, and the program's Credit ROI card shows whether it is on track, below target, or unknown (no margin set yet).

Where else credit ROI shows up

• Dashboard: a Credit ROI tile.

• Program page: a Credit ROI card with what the program's credit has earned back so far, its target, and any projection, with Open in Profitability to go deeper.

• Partner page: a Value tab with Referral ROI (the credit given for this partner's referrals and what it earned back) and Their own spending (what the partner pays you as a customer, which isn't counted in their referral ROI). To see their spending, enter the id your billing knows them by under Link to a customer id, then Save customer id.

• Program assistant: raises ROI suggestions, such as a partner whose referrals pay back quickly (consider a higher rate), a program whose credit returns less than 1× (lower the referee reward or require a second purchase), credit with no ROI because no margin is set, and bonus collectors to review. They only appear when a margin is known and there are enough finished grants.

• Optimizer: under Optimize for, choose Credit ROI instead of ROAS. ROAS measures revenue for each 1 of commission. Credit ROI measures, for each partner's referrals, the profit after for each 1 they cost you: credit on both sides plus cash commissions. So a higher rate reads as a lower ROI. It counts matured referrals only (past the attribution window, or with all their credit used, expired or revoked), so it needs a margin. Set a Target credit ROI, and a partner's rate only moves once enough of their referrals have matured; until then they keep their rate.

Naive and incremental ROI

By default the page uses naive ROI: it counts everything customers paid after getting credit. Some of those customers would have paid anyway, so naive ROI flatters the credit.

Incremental ROI compares against a control group: referred customers who deliberately got no credit. The difference between the two groups is what the credit actually caused. To use it:

1. Turn on a holdout for the program, which keeps a small share of referred customers out of the credit. Only referrals recorded after the holdout is on can be compared.

2. Choose Incremental under How ROI is measured, with a program selected.

If the control group is too small, or the program has no holdout, the page says so instead of showing a number. A control group is how you separate "credit worked" from "these people were going to buy anyway."

The weekly email

Each week, owners and admins get a short email: how much real money came in after credit, what the credit cost, the ROI, and how many people match each pattern, with a link to the Profitability page. It is sent only if your organization has email set up and gave out credit in the last 7 days. Without a margin, it tells you to set one rather than showing a made-up ROI.

To stop receiving it, turn off Weekly credit ROI email in Settings → Credit ROI. It changes only your own email, in the organization you are signed in to; other admins keep getting it. Turn it back on the same way.

Next steps