You have 47 affiliates. Last month they sold ₹412K worth of your product. Your spreadsheet says you owe them ₹38,900. Your bank account says ₹37,200 went out. You're not sure which number is right, so you don't ask. This is commission drift. It compounds monthly. Over a year, it's the salary of a junior ops hire—except you're bleeding it invisibly through rounding, settlement delays, currency conversion, and chargebacks that never make it back to the commission calculation. Most teams accept this as the cost of doing business with affiliates. It isn't. The cost of not tracking it—in reconciliation time, in affiliate disputes, in audit exposure—is higher. Where the ₹35K monthly leak actually happens Commission drift isn't one problem. It's nine problems stacked on top of each other, each small enough to ignore alone and large enough to matter in aggregate. 1. Rounding in commission math You pay 8% commission. An affiliate sells ₹1,523 in orders. 8% of ₹1,523 = ₹121.84. Your spreadsheet rounds to ₹122. Multiply this across 47 affiliates and 200+ transactions monthly, and rounding alone costs ₹800–₹1,200 monthly. It's tiny per transaction. It's ₹10K–₹15K annually. 2. Payment processor settlement delays You use Stripe. An affiliate's customer pays on the 5th. Stripe settles to your bank on the 7th. You run your commission sheet on the 8th and include that sale. You pay the affiliate on the 15th. On the 12th, the customer initiates a chargeback. Stripe reverses the deposit on the 19th. The affiliate got paid for a sale that no longer exists. At a 2–3% chargeback rate and 47 affiliates, this is ₹2,000–₹3,000 monthly in phantom commissions. 3. Multi-currency conversion gaps Three of your affiliates are in Singapore. They sell in SGD. Your accounting is in INR. Your spreadsheet converts SGD to INR manually on the 8th of each month using the 8th's exchange rate. Stripe settled those orders daily, each at a different rate. The gap between the manual rate and the daily rates is ₹1,500–₹2,000 monthly—tiny per transaction, significant in total. 4. Unreimbursed chargebacks A customer disputes a charge 60 days after purchase. Stripe refunds them and bills you a ₹100 chargeback fee. The affiliate who earned 8% on that sale is never charged back. You absorb the commission and the fee. At 15–20 chargebacks monthly, that's ₹1,500–₹2,000 in unrecovered affiliate payout. 5. Partial refunds that never adjust commission A customer buys ₹5,000 of your product. You pay the affiliate ₹400 (8%). The customer returns half the order for ₹2,500. Your returns system credits the customer but doesn't flag the commission sheet. You pay the full ₹400 for a ₹2,500 order. At a 12–15% return rate, this is ₹3,000–₹4,000 monthly. 6. Missed adjustment flags in email chains An affiliate emails you: "I think you missed the bulk order from [company] on the 22nd." You check. They're right. You add it to next month's sheet. But you never check the three previous months for other misses. This happens 2–3 times monthly. One or two always slip through because the affiliate gave up. 7. Payout timing gaps and duplicate payments You pay affiliates on the 15th. You run the commission sheet on the 8th, so it covers the 1st–7th of the month. On the 10th, a large order comes in that should be included. You add it to the next payout manually. Three months later, you forget it was a manual add and run it twice. The affiliate gets ₹800 twice. You catch it after the bank reconciliation takes an extra four hours. 8. No audit trail linking orders to commissions to payouts An affiliate disputes their March payout. You open the spreadsheet. You have the total they were paid, but no way to trace which specific orders generated that commission, whether any were refunded, or whether the payout actually cleared. You spend 90 minutes rebuilding the trail manually. It happens 3–4 times monthly. That's six hours of ops work monthly, or 72 hours annually. 9. Tax withholding applied inconsistently Half your affiliates are in India and need 10% TDS. Three are in Singapore. One is a company, not a person. You pay the Singapore affiliates full commission but withhold for the Indian ones—except in months where you forget and process them all the same. When tax time comes, you're short ₹2,000–₹3,000 in withholding records and spend a week reconstructing them. Most teams lose 8–12% of affiliate payout volume to drift. At ₹38,900 monthly commission spend, that's ₹3,100–₹4,700 leaking silently each month. Over 12 months on a ₹467K annual affiliate spend, you're hemorrhaging ₹37K–₹56K yearly—and you have no idea which problem is costing the most. The 10-minute audit: Find your drift now Step 1: Get last month's commission data (2 min) Export your affiliate spreadsheet for the last completed month. Export your payment processor's settlement report (Stripe, Razorpay, 2Checkout—whatever you use) for the same month. Export your payout ledger (what you actually paid affiliates). Step 2: Trace