Key Takeaways from Mastering the Marketplace: Billing & Payouts

[justinroyal]

The recent Mastering the Marketplace webinar on Billing & Payouts provided an overview of the payouts process lifecycle for the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, how to view and access payout reporting and what payment processes are supported within Partner Center.

Here's a summary of key takeaways from the event. If you want to access the full content, I encourage you to register and watch the recording.

Key Takeaways:

• The concept of payouts is introduced. A payout is a payment made from Microsoft to a publisher for earnings made from a transactable published offer sold to the commercial marketplace.
• The tax profile is a step-by-step guide for publishers to set up their payout account and partner center for publishing a transactable offer in the Azure Marketplace.
• The tax details page of the Azure Marketplace and Tax provides diagrams of commercial marketplace payout scenarios, withholding tax scenarios, and the tax treaty benefits section. The payout profile is a set up process that involves submitting a tax profile and payment profile.
• Aspects of pricing, transactable offers, and currency from the customer purchase to the publisher, including payout prices set up in United States dollars and converted into the local currency of all the selected markets using the current exchange rate, are covered. Customers will see listing prices in their local currency based on their billing interests, and will be billed in their agreement billing currency which can differ from their local currency list.
• The payout timeline is discussed, with payout sent on or before the 15th of each month and payment taking 1 to 10 days depending on the payment method. The monthly exchange rate is also discussed, with a field called exchange rate date in the payout reporting for ISVs to see when the transaction occurred and the monthly rate.
• The revenue dashboard is found under the Analytics tile and enables publishers to reconcile bill sales payouts and analytics reports in the commercial marketplace. The revenue dashboard can answer questions such as how much revenue was invoiced to customers and when can I expect payouts, which customer transacted the offer and where are they located, which offer was purchased, and when was the offer purchased or consumed, what were the billing models and sales channels used, and what were the billing types and sales channels used.
• The payment history page is a more detailed view of the payments page and has filtering options such as three months, six months, 12 months, and a custom date. The transaction history page shows line by line detail for each transaction and the actual status.
• The payout report includes not just the commercial marketplace, but also the consumer marketplace, incentives and other programs, and there are special templates to reduce the number of columns that may not relate to the commercial marketplace.

[#2]

How can I find a printout I can use for tax billing? This has changed quite a bit since I was responsible for the partner portal. I cannot find those Credit documents we were able to download to hand them over to accounting.

[#3]

@CF3378 please refer to this documentation: Payouts and tax profile FAQ - Partner Center | Microsoft Learn

[#4]

@justinroyal 

Thank you, It was not ready for download yet, when I asked the question. It seems to take longer for generation in contrary to a few years before.

Thank you very much, I have the file downloaded now. :)

[#5]

@justinroyal You mentioned customers should see listing prices in their local currency. That's true on the overall listing page, but when you click into a given listing, the currency displayed depends on the regions in which the listing is available. 

For example, if my listing is available in both Canada + the US, and I'm located in the US, the list view will display the listing price in USD. Once I click into the listing, however, it shows in CA dollars. MSFT has identified this as a bug; when will this be resolved?