Approval creates the revenue and payout legs, reversal voids both, prepay balances draw down, and CPM bills each thousand once.
A conversion is not money until it is approved. That single rule is what the whole billing side of Offer Capsule is built on. Recording a conversion writes a row and freezes what it is worth; approving it creates the actual accounting entries - what the advertiser owes and what the affiliate is owed - and draws the advertiser's prepay balance down. Rejection moves nothing. Reversal unwinds both sides. And none of it happens on the tracking request, so a billing problem can never cost you a conversion.
Approving a conversion creates two transaction legs: a revenue leg against the advertiser and a payout leg to the affiliate. They are created together, from the amounts snapshotted onto the conversion when it was recorded, which means the pair always agrees with the conversion row and with each other. Where the offer bills against prepay, approval also draws the balance down at the same time - so an advertiser's remaining balance reflects approved conversions rather than optimistic ones, and a click on an offer whose prepay balance cannot cover its price is stopped at the click with that explicit reason.
A rejected conversion never had legs, so there is nothing to unwind. It sits in the record with its reason attached, visible in reports under the Rejected status, and no money was ever committed against it. This is the practical value of the hold window: the cheapest scrub is the one that happens before anything funds.
When an approved conversion turns out to be a chargeback, a scrub, or a bad lead the advertiser has refused, reversing it voids the revenue leg and the payout leg together. Not one, not a hand-entered adjustment - both, in one transition, with the reason recorded. Only an approved conversion can be reversed, and the transition is idempotent, so a reversal cannot be applied twice. See the conversion lifecycle.
A conversion recorded as a test creates no legs, draws down no balance, fires no postback, and appears in no report. An advertiser can validate their integration against production and see it land without a cent moving anywhere.
CPM offers bill per completed thousand impressions, and the naive way to do that - check after each impression whether the running count has just crossed a multiple of a thousand - is a race. Under concurrent traffic two requests can both see the crossing and bill it twice, or interleave in a way that misses it entirely. Offer Capsule instead keeps a watermark on the offer recording how many impressions have already been billed, and advances it with an atomic compare-and-set: the update only applies if the watermark is still exactly where the caller expected it. Precisely one caller wins each crossing. A completed thousand-impression block bills once, never twice, and never gets skipped - regardless of how many impressions are landing at the same moment. See offer types for where CPM fits.
No money moves on a tracker request. Every conversion and lead is recorded Pending with its amounts frozen, and a background sweep creates the legs and applies the prepay draw-down afterwards - within minutes for an offer with no hold window, and when the window elapses for one that has one. The reason is worth stating plainly: if settlement ran inside the pixel request, then a slow ledger write or a balance lookup problem would turn into a failed conversion pixel and a lost conversion. Moving it off means the tracking request does one small, fast thing that is very hard to break. The money math and the end state are identical; only the timing differs.
Offer Capsule bills through the Lead Capsule platform, so offers use the same billing methods, invoicing and invoice templates, payments, and multi-currency formatting as everything else you run. Offers billed externally are marked as such and excluded from platform billing.
Related: the conversion lifecycle, caps and trafficback, and reporting.
See Offer Capsule running against your own offers. We will follow up to arrange a walkthrough.