Paying affiliates has always been the last manual step in an otherwise automatic program. Tracking runs on its own. Attribution runs on its own. Then, once a month, somebody opens the dashboard and clicks pay, one affiliate at a time.
That is fine at five affiliates. At fifty it is an afternoon.
Automatic payouts are now live for every Insert Affiliate company. You save a card once, switch them on, and a daily run pays every affiliate you owe.
What actually happens
Once a day, Insert Affiliate works out what each of your affiliates is owed, using exactly the same calculation as the manual pay button. It then charges your saved card once per affiliate, per currency, and sends that money straight to the affiliate's Stripe account.
Nothing about the maths changes. If you have product specific commission rates, tiered rates, or per affiliate overrides, the daily run respects all of them, because it is the same code path the manual button has always used.
Rewards owed in different currencies are paid as separate charges in those currencies, at the amounts you promised. Each payout appears on your card statement individually, so your accounting stays legible.
It is opt in, and it stays off until you say so
Automatic payouts are available to every company. There is no waitlist and no invitation.
They are also switched off until you do two things: save a card, and turn the toggle on. If you do nothing, nothing changes. Your program keeps working exactly as it does today, and the manual pay button keeps working too.
Manual and automatic payouts are aware of each other. If you pay someone by hand this morning, the evening run will not pay them again. Nothing is ever paid twice.
Two new settings worth knowing about
Alongside automatic payouts, every company now has a Payout policy section, whether or not automatic payouts are switched on.
Minimum payout. An affiliate is paid once they are owed at least this much. Below that, the balance carries forward to the next run. This keeps you from paying card fees on a ninety cent payout.
Payout hold. A sale becomes payable only once it is a set number of days old. If your typical refund window is two weeks, a fourteen day hold means you are not paying commission on revenue that is about to go back to the customer. Held sales show as available in so many days on the affiliate row, so nobody is left guessing.
Both default to zero, which is exactly how things behave today. They only do something once you set them.
What your affiliates see
Affiliates now have a How you get paid card in their own settings. It shows their commission, whether renewals earn, how often payouts run, the payment method, your minimum, and any delay you have set.
This matters more than it sounds. Most affiliate disputes are not about the money being wrong. They are about the affiliate not knowing what the terms were. Putting the terms in front of them removes most of that conversation before it starts.
Affiliates still have to finish Stripe onboarding
This is worth being clear about. Automatic payouts do not create Stripe accounts for your affiliates, and they do not pay someone who has not finished connecting theirs.
An affiliate without a completed Stripe Connect account is skipped, every time, and listed in your run summary as skipped for that reason. You can still pay them outside Insert Affiliate if you have another arrangement. What automatic payouts will not do is push money into a half finished account.
When something goes wrong
Failure handling is where most of the work went, because a payout system that fails badly is worse than one that does not exist.
If one affiliate's payout fails, the rest of the run carries on. The failed amount stays owed and is retried on the next run, and you can pay it manually in the meantime.
If your card is the problem, whether declined, expired, or held up because your bank wants verification, automatic payouts pause. You get one clear email explaining what happened, rather than a failed charge every day for a week. Saving a new card resumes them.
Either way you get a summary email after each run: what was paid, what failed, and what was skipped, with the reason for each.
Turning it on
Go to Settings, then Payments and Payouts. Add a card, set a minimum if you want one, and switch automatic payouts on.
If you would rather watch a run before trusting it with a schedule, use Run now and read the run detail afterwards. It lists every affiliate the run touched and what happened to them. The full guide is in the documentation, linked in the first comment.