You've agreed to pay creators a percentage of the sales they drive. Sounds fair. Except now you need to actually figure out how many sales each one drove, multiply by their commission rate, cross-reference against returns, and send the right amount to the right person at the right time.
Most brands start this process in a spreadsheet. Creator name in column A, promo code in column B, sales count in column C, commission owed in column D. Update manually every week. Miss a sale here, double-count one there. Send awkward messages when the numbers don't match what the creator expected.
It works until it doesn't, which is usually around creator number four.
Why spreadsheets break
The core problem is that spreadsheets track what you tell them, not what actually happened. You're copying numbers from your Shopify dashboard, your payment processor, maybe your email platform, and pasting them together. Every step is a chance to get it wrong.
Then there's timing. A creator posts on Tuesday. Someone clicks through on Wednesday, browses for a bit, and buys on Friday. Another person sees the post on Tuesday but doesn't buy until the following week. Which of those count? What's your attribution window? Most spreadsheet setups just count whatever the promo code says, which — as anyone who's dealt with coupon sites knows — is unreliable at best.
Returns make it worse. Someone buys, the creator gets credited, then the customer returns the product a week later. Do you claw back the commission? When? How do you track that without manually checking refund reports against your commission sheet?
The honour system problem
Some brands skip tracking altogether and just ask creators to report their own results. "Let me know how many clicks you got and I'll pay you accordingly." This is the honour system, and it has obvious flaws — not because creators are dishonest, but because their data and your data will never match.
A creator sees 500 link clicks in their Instagram insights. You see 300 sessions from that source in your analytics. The discrepancy could be bot clicks, people bouncing before the page loads, ad blockers, or just different measurement methods. Neither number is wrong, but they're not the same, and now you're having an uncomfortable conversation about who owes what.
What a proper commission tracker actually does
At minimum, you need three things: a unique link per creator, server-side click and purchase tracking, and automatic matching between the two.
The unique link part is straightforward. Instead of a promo code, each creator gets their own URL. When their audience clicks it, the click is recorded with a timestamp and anonymous identifier. No coupon codes to leak, no discount sites to interfere with.
Server-side tracking means the data doesn't depend on cookies, browser extensions, or the customer doing anything special. The click is logged when it happens. The purchase is logged when it happens. Your system matches them.
Automatic matching is where the spreadsheet falls apart and proper tooling earns its keep. A click on Monday and a purchase on Thursday get linked together without you doing anything. A return the following week adjusts the attribution. The commission calculation updates in real time.
How this works in practice
Say you're working with five creators on a commission basis. Each gets 10% of sales they drive.
You create five tracked links — one per creator — through your attribution tool. Each creator puts their link in their bio, Stories, or wherever they're posting. When someone taps the link, the click is tracked. When that person buys something, the purchase is attributed to the creator whose link they originally clicked.
At the end of the month, you pull up your dashboard. Creator A drove 12 purchases totalling £840. Creator B drove 3 purchases totalling £195. Creator C drove 0 purchases despite 40,000 views on their post. The commission calculation is right there: £84 for A, £19.50 for B, nothing for C.
No spreadsheet formulas. No "I think my code was used 15 times." No arguments. Just data.
Picking the right tool
The market splits roughly into three tiers.
Enterprise platforms like Impact and Partnerize handle commissions at scale but charge accordingly. If you're managing hundreds of affiliates and processing thousands of orders, they make sense. If you're a small brand working with five to twenty creators, you're paying for a lorry when you need a bicycle.
Mid-range influencer platforms like Grin or CreatorIQ bundle commission tracking with influencer discovery, campaign management, and reporting. They're better suited to small brands but still run £300-500 a month. For many early-stage businesses, that subscription costs more than the commissions they're paying out.
Then there's the lightweight approach: a tool that just does attribution and lets you calculate commissions from the data. LinkOwl works this way. Create a tracked link per creator, connect your payment processor (RevenueCat, Stripe, or Shopify via webhooks), and the purchases get attributed automatically. You pay 5p per attributed sale — no monthly fee, no minimum spend. The commission maths is yours to do however you want, but the underlying data is solid.
The real cost of getting it wrong
Bad commission tracking costs you twice. First, you overpay creators who didn't actually drive the sales (usually because coupon sites intercepted the attribution). Second, you lose good creators who did drive sales but got underpaid because the tracking missed their contribution.
That second one hurts more. A creator who drives real revenue for your brand and gets shorted on their commission isn't going to complain publicly. They're just going to stop replying to your DMs and go work with a competitor who tracks properly.
Accurate attribution also changes how you negotiate. When you can show a creator that their last three posts drove £2,000 in revenue, the conversation about rates is entirely different. You have data. They have data. Everyone can see what's working and price accordingly.
Getting started
If you're currently running commissions off a spreadsheet, the switch is smaller than you'd think. Create tracked links for your active creators, swap them in for whatever promo codes or generic URLs they're currently using, and let the data build for a couple of weeks.
Once you have attribution data flowing, the commission calculation becomes a simple query: which creator drove which purchases, at what value, during what period. Whether you pay weekly, monthly, or per-campaign is up to you — the point is that the numbers underneath are accurate.
The spreadsheet can stay for now if you want. Just stop using it as the source of truth and start using it as a view on top of real tracking data. That alone will fix most of the arguments.