Helm › Helm University › Track 4 › Lesson 4.4
Lesson 4.4When you actually get paid
Three tiers, three different waits, and a fallback that means you can never be stranded.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Work out your own payout hold, and name the backstop that pays you when nothing else does.
The hold, and why it exists
Your money is not released the moment a card clears. It is held, and released a set number of days after delivery.
The reason is straightforward: a refund or a chargeback has to be settleable out of money Helm actually holds. An unproven seller waits longer because the risk is higher, and that is the whole of it.
Three tiers
| Tier | You reach it at | Hold after delivery |
|---|---|---|
| Introductory | Where everyone starts | 14 days |
| Standard | 5 released orders | 7 days |
| Express | 25 released orders | 2 days |
Your first order is held for two weeks after it arrives. That is worth planning around, because it is the longest wait you will ever have and it lands exactly when your cash is tightest.
The one thing that pushes you back down
A refund rate above 5% drops you to introductory whatever your volume, because volume is not evidence of a clean record.
The rate is measured over a rolling window of the last 60 days or 30 orders, whichever covers more, and it is not applied at all until you have at least 10 orders inside that window. One refunded order is not a rate, it is one order.
Track 9 explains the two different clocks in more detail, including why promotion counts your whole history while demotion only counts recent evidence.
The backstop
Delivery on Helm is often recorded by a person pressing a button. If nobody ever presses it, the delivery clock never starts.
So there is a fallback: an order releases once it has been shipped for 14 days, whatever the delivery state. A seller must never be stranded because a confirmation nobody owns never arrived.
You are paid at the tier hold after delivery, or 14 days after shipping, whichever comes first.
Nobody at Helm approves your payout
There is no human in this loop and no admin screen that overrides it. A transfer that fails is not an alert somebody triages, it is a row that gets retried later on a backing off schedule. If you have not finished your Stripe onboarding, your funds stay held and are paid automatically the moment you do finish.
You do not need to chase anybody, and there is nobody to chase.