You approve a ₹2L affiliate payout on Thursday. Your finance team runs a reconciliation on Friday and finds ₹18K missing from the total you authorized. Two weeks later, another ₹12K discrepancy surfaces in a different cohort. By year-end, ₹24K has vanished—or worse, your team has paid the same commission twice to three different partners. This is not unusual. Affiliate payout drift runs 8–12% annually across most mid-market businesses, and the leak almost never comes from one place. Instead, nine common failures compound: spreadsheet formula errors cascade into rounding mistakes, which collide with double-counted commissions when deals move pipeline stages, which interact with missing refund reversals and tax withholding miscalculations. By the time you see the problem, the transactions are weeks old and buried across payment processors, accounting records, and CRM stage histories. This guide names all nine leak points and gives you a nine-checkpoint audit to find them. Checkpoint 1: Spreadsheet formula errors and the cascade effect The majority of affiliate teams still manage payouts in Excel or Google Sheets. A formula that rounds down commission percentages in column D, multiplied across 200 rows, can lose ₹500–₹2,000 per payout cycle depending on deal volume. The leak is small enough per row that it survives the eye, but it compounds monthly. How to audit: Pull your last three months of payout spreadsheets. Recalculate the total commission for at least 20 random rows using a calculator. If your spreadsheet total differs by more than 0.1%, your formula is rounding at the wrong step or applying an inconsistent rule. Real example: A SaaS team calculated affiliate commission as Deal Value × Commission % ÷ 100 , but set the column to show only two decimal places. The underlying values carried four decimals, so ₹10,000 × 5% appeared as ₹500.00 but was actually ₹500.0001 after rounding in the formula. Across 150 monthly deals, this lost ₹35 per cycle—₹420 yearly. Checkpoint 2: Currency rounding when your partners are international If you pay affiliates in USD, EUR, or SGD but your CRM and accounting records live in INR, each conversion introduces rounding. Most teams convert once (CRM value → payout currency), but some inadvertently convert twice (CRM → accounting at one rate, accounting → payout at another). The two rates rarely match, and the difference compounds. How to audit: Pick three payouts in different months. Trace the deal value from your CRM, through your accounting ledger, to the payment processor settlement. Check the exchange rate used at each step. If you see two different rates for the same deal, or if the final payout amount differs from your spreadsheet by more than 0.5%, you have a rounding leak. Real example: A SaaS company paid a US affiliate a commission on a ₹50,000 INR deal. The CRM converted it to USD at 83.2 (₹50,000 ÷ 83.2 = $601.04). The accounting team re-converted the payout at 83.5 ($601.04 × 83.5 = ₹50,186.84 INR) before reconciling to the original ₹50,000. The ₹186 discrepancy was written off as rounding but repeated monthly across 12 international payouts. Checkpoint 3: Double-counted commissions when deals move between rep pipelines Your CRM pipeline is the source of truth for deal value and affiliate commission. But if a deal moves from one sales rep to another—or is split between two reps—and your payout formula counts the deal at both rep assignments, you pay commission twice. This is especially common when deals migrate from a partner/affiliate into your direct team, or when a deal is credited to two people simultaneously. How to audit: Query your CRM for deals that changed owner or were assigned to multiple contacts in the last 90 days. For each one, check whether a payout was issued at the first assignment, then again at the second. If yes, you have a double-count. Even a 5% overlap across 50 deals = ₹5K leaked. Real example: An affiliate brought in a ₹1L SaaS deal. The CRM marked it as commission-eligible and the affiliate was paid 10% (₹10,000). Two weeks later, the deal was re-assigned to an account manager for expansion. The payout formula didn't have a rule to suppress commission on re-assignment, so the system paid another ₹10,000 to the same affiliate. Finance caught it after two months. Checkpoint 4: Missing reversals on refunded or cancelled deals A deal closes and commission is paid. Three months later, the customer churns and the deal is reversed in accounting. But the affiliate commission was never reversed. The affiliate keeps ₹10,000 on a deal that no longer exists, and the accrual sits in your books until an annual audit finds it. How to audit: Pull a list of all deals marked as lost, refunded, or cancelled in the last 12 months. For each one, check whether a negative commission entry (reversal) was posted in your accounting system. If a deal shows a payout but no reversal, it's a leak. Calculate the total value of un-reversed payouts. Real example: An e