This article explains how our analytics dashboards work and how to use them to understand your earnings.
The following chart identifies the four main steps in the process and the associated dashboards that describe them:
In addition to those four dashboards, we provide several other views for convenience.
Below is a summary chart of your creator dashboards. Feel free to click on the links to be taken to a more in-depth explanation of each dashboard:
| Dashboard or CSV | Summary |
| Creator overview | An estimation of your per month earnings – this number fluctuates depending on your patron count, adjustments to pledged amounts, declines and cancellations. We display annual pledges as their monthly equivalent (annual pledge amount divided by 12). |
| Earnings | Once we process a payment, we subtract any fees and refunds, with the remainder flowing into your Creator Balance. This dashboard summarises the flow of funds based on when the transactions occurred. The “Declines” column shows the value of all declined payments in a given month, which updates as charges are recovered for you automatically. |
| Pledge Growth | A health check for your memberships, pledge growth reports on new pledges, upgrades, downgrades and cancellations. Organised by month, you’ll be able to review the total changes to your memberships. |
| Patronage | The Patronage dashboard provides an alternative view of your earnings. It summarises what your subscribers paid for instead of when they paid. Per post, creators will have processed amounts listed by each paid post. In contrast, monthly creators will have processed amounts listed by each month they are active on Patreon. |
| Payouts | This dashboard summarises the outflow of funds from your Creator Balance. When you withdraw funds from your account or use your balance to pay subscriptions to other creators, those transactions appear here. |
| Refunds CSV | This CSV download lists refunds issued from your account. |
| Sales Tax CSV | This CSV download lists the sales tax we’ve collected and paid on your behalf. |
A few notes on your dashboards:
- For creators with charge-up-front enabled, a patron might pay you in a month and then delete their subscription. In this case, they’ll appear as charged but may not appear as an active subscription in the Pledge Growth dashboard.
- The Attempted Amount Charged column on your Earnings dashboard may display a different amount than your total pledges calculated from your Relationship Manager due to mid-month upgrades and downgrades.
Creator overview
Your home dashboard is a snapshot estimation of your monthly earnings. You can expect this number to change every month as new patrons come, cancel, decline or adjust their payment amount.
If you have annual patrons, your overview number will estimate the monthly equivalent of their payment.
For example, we’ll display a £120 annual membership as £10 per month in your Creator home overview. We process the total £120 in a lump sum and make it available for payout from your creator balance immediately.
Earnings
This dashboard summarises income associated with your creator page. We organise data by the time transactions occur.
Examples:
- Patron A creates a subscription on 16 February, but isn’t charged until 1 March. The earnings from that transaction will appear in March.
- If a refund processes in October for a transaction that initially occurred in July, the refund will appear in October.
Your Earnings dashboard includes the following columns:
| Column | Summary |
| Month | The month in which you received money to your creator balance. |
| Attempted amount charged | All of the charges we attempted that month before declines, refunds and fees. |
| Declines | The value of attempted charges declined this month. This column value will likely decrease as we retry your declined patrons and process them to your creator balance. |
| Total Refunds | The amount of any refunds issued in that month. This column only includes the creator’s share of any refunds; Patreon’s fee, processing fees, and taxes are refunded by Patreon and therefore do not appear here. This also does not include fraud refunds. Here’s an article with more information on fraud refunds. |
| Payment Fees | Payment-processing fees cover the cost of processing payments from your patrons. Please visit our article with information about fees to learn more about fees. |
| Platform Fees | The sum of Patreon’s platform fee applied to the pledges. Please visit our pricing page for detailed information. |
| Merch items & shipping | If you use Patreon merch, this column shows each month’s merch cost. |
| Earnings | This column indicates the net amount you earned after deducting: refunds, Patreon’s fee and processing fees. This is the amount that goes into your creator balance. If you have annual patrons, their payments will populate in the month in which they paid – meaning that in the month we process their payment, we’ll show the total yearly amount. We don’t spread the earnings from an annual membership across the year. |
Pledge growth
This dashboard summarises changes to your total value of pledges each month – new pledges, upgrades, downgrades and cancellations. This dashboard does not report on declined pledges, only changes made directly by patrons. You can review declined pledges in your Earnings dashboard.
Here’s a breakdown of your Pledge growth dashboard:
| Column | Summary |
| Month | The month of the year. |
| New Pledges | The value and number of new pledges to your page. A pledge is considered “new” in a month if the patron did not have a pledge to you in the prior month. |
| Upgrades | The value and number of pledges that increased in value. The amount shown is the amount by which existing pledges increased. For example, if a patron pledged £10 to you last month and increased the pledge to £15 this month, this column would show £5 in increased pledges. |
| Cancellations | The value and number of deleted pledges. For example, if a patron pledged £10 to you last month and deleted their pledge this month, this column would show £10 in deleted pledges. |
| Downgrades | The value and number of pledges that decreased in value. The amount shown is the amount by which existing pledges fell. For example, if a patron pledged £15 to you last month and decreased the pledge to £10 this month, this column would show £5 in decreased pledges. |
| Total Change | The amount by which your total pledges and number of patrons changed over the month. |
Here are some details to consider:
- This dashboard aggregates each patron’s monthly changes. For example, say a new patron pledged £10 on 2 January. They then decreased their pledge to £5 on 4 January and increased their pledge to £20 on 5 January. If the new patron left their pledge unchanged for the rest of January, their net impact on your pledge growth would be £20 for January. This dashboard wouldn’t show all of the individual increases and decreases.
- For charge up-front creators, say a new patron pledges £10 on 6 February. Suppose they delete their pledge on 10 February. In that case, their pledge won’t appear as a new or deleted pledge in the Pledge Growth dashboard. Since we aggregate the patrons’ net behaviour for the month, the patron’s pledge won’t count toward your growth chart. Since the patron paid the creator when they joined, the Earnings dashboard would include the £10 for that pledge in February. However, the Pledge Growth dashboard would not have the behaviour as a growth data point. It would show £0 as the “amount pledged at the end of the month”.
- For per-post creators, this dashboard shows the base amount of the subscription. For example, a new patron pledged £5 per creation. The pledge growth dashboard would show a pledge of £5, even though the creator might earn more or less depending on how many times they publish paid posts and the patron’s monthly max.
- Detailed pledge data from December 2015 onwards can be downloaded via the CSV download link.
Patronage
Available to creators on the Pro or Premium platform plans, this dashboard summarises payments based on what people paid for rather than when the payment processes.
If a creator is paid monthly, the dashboard will show the following:
| Column | Summary |
| Month | The month that the patron paid for. |
| Paying Patrons | The number of patrons with successfully processed pledges for that month. |
| Pledges Processed | The amount of successfully processed pledges for that month, minus any refunded payments. |
| New Paying Patrons | The number of new patrons that month. |
| Pledges Processed From New Patrons | The value of pledges processed from new patrons (i.e. the value from the first month paid for by those patrons). |
For a detailed list of patrons who paid for each month or post, please consult either the Patron Manager or the detailed CSV download link available in the Patronage section of your Dashboard.
If a creator is paid on a per-post basis, the dashboard will instead show this information for each paid post that the creator published.
Payouts
In the Payouts Withdraw section, you can:
- Withdraw your earnings from your Patreon balance
- Set up auto-withdrawal
The rest of the dashboard summarises your monthly deductions from your creator balance with the following columns:
| Column | Summary |
| Date | When the payout was initiated. |
| Description | What the payout was for (i.e. auto-withdrawal or payments to other creators). |
| Destination | Where the withdrawal was sent. |
| Amount | The total value of funds withdrawn. |
| Status | Whether the withdrawal was successful or not. |