Working with your own finance templates

What is a finance template?

Finance templates are the basis of all official finance documents on the platform: advertiser deposits, advertiser refunds, advertiser invoices and payout entries for your partners as well as reversals. By creating a template, you define how these documents will look like, meaning what information it contains and where the data is displayed. The platform will then fill the templates automatically when you create a new finance document of the different types.

Note that you don’t need to create templates. See “System Templates” for details.

Getting started

Make sure you are logged in to your admin UI. Go to the administration section in the navigation menu and click on ‘customization’ and proceed to click on ‘finance templates’. If you do so, you will see a page looking more or less like this:

The table here contains all templates that have been created for your platform. As you can see in the first column on the left, the templates are ordered by entity, i.e. the legal body responsible for the payment of the partners and the billing of the advertisers in your platform. In the first row of the table, you will find so called platform templates, that are used as default templates. Every template has a language and a date on which the template was created.

In the other columns, you will find the templates are ordered by type: deposit, refund, invoice (for the billing of your advertisers) and payout entry (for the payout of your partners).

Fallback logic

If you are creating a new financial document, the platform will automatically pick the template that is most relevant. The language will correspond with the language the partner or advertiser has registered; the entity will correspond with the entity to which the advertiser or partner has been allocated.

If no template for the language the partner or advertiser registered has been created, the platform will use the English version of the template related to the entity to which the partner or advertiser is allocated. If no template has been created for the related entity, the platform template will be used as default.

About reversals

Add the reversal note placeholder to the original template (Deposit, Refund, Invoice, Payout). In case of a reversal, this document will be generated again with the added reversal not in the specified place.

Creating a new template

General settings

Before you start creating the actual template, you need to decide for what financial document, for what entity and in what language you want to create a template for by clicking on the corresponding button in the table. If you want to translate an existing template to another language, click on the icon appearing when you scroll over the button with your mouse. You will then be able to select a source template as base.

If you click on the ‘plus’ button, the following page will appear:

To create a new template, start by defining the general settings by clicking on the button in the top left corner of the page. If you do so, a small panel will open up in which you can do the following:

Define the default font used in the template
Choose whether you want to use a second page.
Define the format of the margins. Please note that in some countries, there are legal norms for the margins of invoices and payment entries.
Whether you want to use footers. Please note that if you enable footers, you need to define the number of text sections you want to use in your footer. The actual texts can be created in the text sections in the text editors below.

Finish your settings by simply clicking somewhere into the template on the right.

Selecting elements

When you have created your footers, start creating your template by selecting elements from the menu on the left and drag and drop them on the white page on the right, which represents your template. Following elements are available:

The logo element, which contains the platform logo.
The free text element, which does not contain any data placeholders and can be used for additional text, messages, etc.
The entity address, which contains the address of the relevant entity.
Depending on what template you are creating, you can also add an element containing the address of the partner or the advertiser.
The financial data element contains the placeholders for the financial data (commission earned, fee generated, etc.) related to the template.
The tax data element contains the placeholders related to tax data related to the template.
The financial details element contains placeholders for the details (commission target, ad space, etc.) related to the template.

Editing elements

Once you have dropped the element on the template, you can edit the element: just click on the element and you will see a small panel appearing in the left top corner looking like this:

Under positioning, you can set the precise position for the element on your template. Under content, you can adjust the content of the element using the WYSIWYG editor. Feel free to change the order of the placeholders as well.

Adding additional placeholders

You can add additional placeholders to an element using the icon within the editing element panel. What placeholders are available, depends on the type of element you added to the template. The free text element contains all available placeholders.

Saving the template

You can save your template with the ‘save template’ button in the right top corner of the page.

For your inspiration: some examples

Partner billing template

In most countries, a payment entry for a partner needs to contain the address of the entity and the partner, a date, a reference number, a breakdown of the figures and applied taxes and a VAT ID number. If you include this, you payment entry will look more or less like this:

To be able to create a payment entry like this, your template needs to contain the following elements:

System Templates

If a document template is not specified, the appropriate system template will apply
Here is how the template look like