Common questions about payouts and taxes

All partners enrolling in a new program must provide valid payout and tax details to complete their enrollment and receive payments.

An enrollment is considered complete only after Microsoft has validated your payout and tax profile.

You might also need to update your information if the rules for your program change or if aspects of your profile expire or become outdated. If that happens, your Overview page will show a status of Action required – Update bank and/or tax profile.

For detailed information about how to update payment and tax details in Partner Center, see Set up commercial marketplace payout and tax profiles.

Two reasons for not seeing enrollment are:

• You don't have the required permissions.
• You're logged in with an account that doesn't have the required permissions.

For example, only Incentives admins for your Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program location can create or manage payout and tax profiles.

To manage permissions, contact your organization administrator.

Contact your Account administrator to add more domains to the Microsoft Entra account.

It depends on your organization's needs. Payment profiles are created at an organization level, which enables the same bank profile to be assigned across multiple PartnerIDs and programs within an organization. In most cases, you can either reuse an existing profile or create a new one.

There might be exceptions when applying your bank profile to different countries or regions, because local bank or tax rules might apply.

Tax profiles created for a Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program location get reused and automatically populated when the same Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program location participates in another program. There can be exceptions, however. For example, the payout rules of a new incentive program might require more details for the tax profile.

If your company is invited for multiple programs, you can use the same payment account for all your programs, or you can choose to have different payment accounts for the different programs.

It's the company's responsibility to ensure that the role of Incentives admin—which has the permissions to edit that information—is only given to appropriate employees.

If a tax profile is expired or is about to expire, that means that the tax form that you had provided to Microsoft needs to be updated.

To update your tax profile, use the following steps:

1. Sign in to Partner Center and select the Settings (gear) icon.
2. Select Account settings and then select **Payout and tax profile.
3. Select Tax profiles.
4. Check the column Expiration Date and go to the tax profile that is expired or about to expire.
5. Select Edit to launch the tax profile edit process.
6. In the tax form section, provide the updated details.

• The customer order might not be eligible for payout yet.
  • For non-enterprise customer orders, Microsoft must receive customer payment before a publisher becomes eligible for earnings.
  • For EA customers the earnings will be eligible for payout after the customer invoice is created. Purchase Order date and Invoice date can be different. For example, if the customer purchases a product on March 22nd, it will be invoiced between the 1st and 5th of May, based on customer account billing anniversary.
  • Verify order status in Orders reports.
• Earnings from transactions before July 2019 might appear in the transaction history report. You can look for them at Payouts > Export data.

• If a customer makes a partial payment for an order, your earning amount will be based on the partially paid amount (after fees and appropriate taxes are deducted).
• Check tax remit responsibility by country/region. In countries/regions in which Microsoft is responsible for collecting taxes, Microsoft collects and deducts the tax from publisher earnings. The transaction amount shown in the statement is the after-tax amount.
• Offers have a store service fee of 3%, so the effective earnings rate is 97%.

For more information, see:

• Microsoft Publisher Agreement
• Earnings overview

Use AssetID, orderID, and line item ID in the earning report with analytic orders and usage reports.

Use this mapping:

• Payout Transaction History.AssetID = order.AssetID
• Payout Transaction History.OrderID & LineItem = Usage.UsageReferenceID [AssetID:LineItemID]

• First, using your assetID, check customer orders in Orders reports.
• Check the customer channel for your customer subscription in customers report.
• For enterprise customers, publisher earnings appear in the statement one to two days after the purchase order date.
• For non-enterprise customers, publisher earnings appear in the statement one to two days after a customer payment is received.

For more information, see:

• Earnings
• Orders dashboard in commercial marketplace analytics

• Ensure that your payout status and tax profile status appear as valid on the overview page.
• You might not have met the minimum threshold for a payment. Earnings must be at least USD50 to receive a payment.

You can hold payments in Payout Profile. To do so, select Hold. Microsoft will hold payment to you until you release the hold.

The selection of the payment profile country/region, as part of the Partner Center registration, determines which payout options and currency are available.

• For EFT (bank) payments in the United States, you can only select USD currency.
• For bank payments in all other countries/regions, all available currencies are available for selection if they're supported by the pay to bank.
• PayPal as a payout option is allowed for Azure Marketplace in some countries and regions.

• Payout currency is determined by the currency you selected in the payout profile.
• Purchase currency is determined the currency in which the customer paid.

Payment adjustments are payment corrections to accommodate compensatory adjustments such as system issues.

In a payout statement, the ReasonCode specifies the reason for an adjustment. ReasonCodes aren't meant to reconcile directly with individual transactions.

To learn more, see the following pages:

• Microsoft Publisher Agreement
• Earnings overview

• In the transaction history download, find the Tax model column, which shows MS Managed or ISV Managed.

• To see country/region-specific tax rules and payout implications, see Tax details for commercial marketplace publishers.

Go to the Payout Payment page and then the List of Payment section.

A link to the service fee tax form appears for a payment that has a service fee tax.

Go to the Account settings | Payout and tax profiles to view your year-end tax forms.

Withholding tax is applicable for U.S. publishers who filed a W-9 form. Withholding tax is calculated on a monthly payment.

For more information, see:

• Commercial Marketplace Publisher Agreement
• Payout policy details

1. Check your roles. You must have the Financial contributor or Account owner role to access a payout statement.
2. From the dashboard, select the Payouts workspace to view your payout statement.
3. Choose between Transaction History, Payment, and Download.

For more information, see:

• Payout roles and permissions
• Earnings

For a detailed list of the attributes and their meanings, see Earnings.

Earning status shows your earnings as either unprocessed, processed, or sent.

• Unprocessed earnings are in escrow until their maturity date.
• Processed earnings have matured and are prepared in a monthly payment. Payments are released by fifteenth day of each month.
• Sent payments have been successfully released to the bank on your payout profile.

Go to the Payout Payment page and then the List of Payment section. A link to the service fee tax form appears for a payment that has a service fee tax.

Go to the Payout Payment page and then the List of Payment section. A link to a withholding tax form appears next to a payment. A withholding tax form applies only to selected incentive programs, not to a commercial marketplace payout.

Go to the Profile page to view your year-end tax forms.

To learn more, see the following pages:

• Earnings
• Transaction history download

A historical statement shows a snapshot of payout data as of October 2019. Payout information in a historical statement isn't updated. Submit a support request to get the latest information.

To learn more, see the following pages:

• Earnings
• Transaction history download

Use the Partner Payouts API.

• The store service fee is 3%.
• In your payout statement, Earning Rate specifies the actual payout rate for a given transaction.

• Once your earning is in unprocessed status, you can check maturity date for the month your earnings is processed for payment.
• Once your payment is prepared, your earning status will change to Processed. Microsoft releases payments by the fifteenth do of the maturity month.
• For orders paid by credit card, Microsoft holds payments for 30 days until the earning has matured.

For more information, see:

• Microsoft Publisher Agreement
• Earnings overview

Next steps

• Earnings overview
• Set up commercial marketplace payout and tax profiles