Helm › Helm University › Track 5 › Lesson 5.5
Lesson 5.5When you actually get paid
The clock starts at the carrier's delivery timestamp, not at ours. Here is the whole rule, including the backstop for when delivery is never recorded.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Predict your payout date for any delivered order, including the shipped date fallback.
The rule in one line
Payout date equals the carrier's delivery timestamp plus your tier's hold.
Delivered Tuesday, standard tier, seven day hold, paid the following Tuesday. That is the whole calculation for the overwhelming majority of orders.
The carrier's timestamp, not ours
The clock anchors on the delivery time recorded against the shipment by the carrier. Helm does not decide when your order was delivered and cannot move that date. It comes in from tracking.
This is worth appreciating. On a platform where delivery is confirmed by somebody pressing a button, the clock starts when a human gets round to it. On Helm it starts when the parcel actually arrived.
When delivery is never recorded
Sometimes it fails. Tracking goes quiet, a scan never happens, a label gets damaged. If a delivery is never recorded, your money would sit there forever, so there is a backstop.
14 days from the shipped date, whatever the delivery state, the order becomes eligible to release. That window is comfortably past normal domestic transit, so it only fires when the delivery signal genuinely failed rather than racing ahead of a slow parcel.
The principle behind the backstop
A seller must never be stranded because a confirmation nobody owns never arrived. You did your part when you handed the parcel over with proof. The rest is not your problem to chase.
What stops a payout
One thing, and it is absolute. An open refund freezes the payout. When a refund starts on an order, that order's next payout attempt is pushed far out so the job stops selecting it. A refund always beats a payout, even a payout that was due today.
If the refund is resolved in your favour, the order thaws and pays out normally.
What does not stop a payout
- A weekend or a holiday. The payout hold is calendar days, not business days. Only refund response deadlines use business days.
- A failed transfer. If the transfer errors, it retries on a backoff of one minute, five minutes, thirty minutes, two hours, six hours, then daily. Nothing is dropped.
Nobody presses a button
There is no payout request, no minimum threshold to reach, and no weekly payout run to catch. A background job looks for orders whose hold has expired and moves them. A failed transfer is not an alert for a human, it is a row with a later retry time.
Four examples
| Situation | Tier | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Delivered 1 March | Introductory | 15 March |
| Delivered 1 March | Standard | 8 March |
| Delivered 1 March | Express | 3 March |
| Shipped 1 March, never marked delivered | Any | 15 March |
Next: where to find this date in My Store, and what to do when it moves.