Funding ad spend when commissions arrive months later

Performance marketing has a timing problem built into its core. You pay for ad spend the moment a campaign runs, but you collect the commission that spend earns weeks or even months later. Every pound, dollar or euro you put into an ad account is, in effect, a loan you give yourself and wait to be repaid.

That gap is your float, and it is the single most important number in your business that nobody puts on an invoice. Ignore it and a profitable campaign can still drain your account dry. This guide explains what the float is, how to size it, and how to fund it so growth never stalls for want of cash.

Why the gap exists

The structural reality of affiliate and media-buying work is simple to state and painful to live with: you pay out instantly and get paid slowly. Ad platforms bill you daily, sometimes more often once you cross a spend threshold. The networks and advertisers you promote, by contrast, settle on net terms after a validation hold, so the money you earned in one month is rarely in your hands before the next.

Picture a typical month. You earn 10,000 in commissions during February, but that sum is not deposited until March. Meanwhile 8,000 of ad costs hit your card in February itself. On paper you made 2,000 of profit. In your account you are 8,000 in the hole until the commission clears. That is a paper profit with negative cash flow, and it is the trap that catches scaling marketers off guard.

How to size your float

Your float is the total cash you must have available to keep spending while you wait to be paid. A workable estimate is your average daily ad spend multiplied by the number of days between spending and collection. If you spend 500 a day and your money comes back in 60 days on average, you need roughly 30,000 of working capital in motion at any time.

Two factors push that number up. The first is the collection lag itself, which combines payout terms with validation holds and can easily run 30 to 120 days end to end. The second is growth: every time you scale daily spend, the float scales with it, so a doubling of budget doubles the cash you must carry. Build a small buffer on top for billing spikes, currency swings and the odd late-paying advertiser.

Ways to fund the float

There are only a few honest sources of float, and most marketers blend them. Retained profit is the cleanest: you hold back a slice of each payout so the business funds its own runway rather than relying on outside money. Card billing terms help too, because the days between an ad charge and the card statement coming due are days you do not have to find cash for.

Some marketers lean on external credit or revenue-based finance to bridge the gap, which can work but adds cost and risk if a campaign underperforms. Whatever the mix, the discipline that matters most is keeping a clear line between the cash that funds spend and the cash that is genuinely yours to take, so you never spend the float by mistake.

Protecting against shocks

The float is fragile because the inflows are less certain than the outflows. A commission can be clawed back after a refund, a payout can slip past its expected date, and a currency move can shrink a foreign-earned commission by the time it lands. Any of these can turn a comfortable buffer into a shortfall.

The defence is to plan for the slowest realistic case rather than the average. Track each advertiser's actual payment behaviour, not the terms they quote, and keep a reserve that is ring-fenced from day-to-day spending. Holding your earnings in the currencies you actually earn in also removes one source of surprise, because you are not forced to convert at a bad moment just to cover a bill.

How Altery fits

Altery gives performance marketers tools to manage the float deliberately rather than hope it works out. A multi-currency business account lets you hold balances in USD, EUR and GBP, so commissions earned abroad sit in their own currency and you convert on your own timeline instead of at whatever rate applies the day a bill is due.

You can ring-fence working capital and reserves in dedicated pots, keeping the cash that funds ad spend separate from the cash you have actually earned. Business cards, virtual and physical, carry per-card spend limits so ad budgets are funded predictably and a runaway campaign cannot drain the whole account. Real-time balances show exactly where the float stands at any moment. Altery is not a bank, and this guide is general information rather than financial advice; treat your own numbers and obligations as the final word.

Frequently asked questions