Creator Income Dashboards

 

In addition to those four dashboards, we provide several other views for convenience. Here’s a quick summary of the views:

• Pledge Growth: When a patron creates a subscription to you, the value of their subscription appears in the “Pledge Growth” section.
• Declines: Over the course of each month, we’ll attempt to process payments for the work that you performed. The “Declines” section shows the value of all attempted, declined, and successful payments. A few notes:
• For creators with annual plans, we only process an annual subscription’s payment at the beginning of each annual subscription period. Therefore, the total amount pledged might exceed the amount we attempt.
• For creators who charge their patrons per-post, the amount we attempt depends on how many paid posts you created.
• 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 they won’t appear as an active subscription in the “Pledge Growth” dashboard.
• Earnings: Once we successfully process a payment, we subtract any fees and refunds and the remainder flows into your Creator Balance. This dashboard summarises the flow of funds based on when the transactions occurred.
• Patronage: This dashboard provides an alternative view of your earnings. It summarises what your subscribers paid for instead of when they paid. For per-post creators, it shows a list of your paid posts and the total amount processed for each one. For monthly creators, it shows a list of your active months on Patreon and the amount that subscribers paid for each one.
• 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: This dashboard summarises refunds issued from your account.
• Taxes: This dashboard summarises taxes that we’ve collected and paid on your behalf.

Below are sections that describe each dashboard in detail. Jump ahead to any section you’re interested in: 

• Earnings
• Pledge growth
• Patronage (only available on Pro and Premium)
• Refunds
• Declines
• Payout balance (where you’ll set up payout information)
• Payout history
• Taxes
• Post Dashboard and Engagement
  
  

Earnings

• Month:  The month in which you receive money in your creator balance
• Earnings Before Refunds: The total value of successfully-processed payments from your patrons.
• Total Refunds: The value of any refunds issued in that month. Note that 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.
• Earnings Before Fees: Payments that were processed successfully after deducting 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.
• Earnings Before Tax: The net amount that you earned after deducting refunds, Patreon fee, and processing fees. This is the amount that goes into your creator balance.

If you have annual memberships, the payments from your annual patrons will populate in the month in which they paid. If a patron pays £x in a particular month for a year of access, we show the full £x in the month when we processed the payment; we don’t spread the earnings from an annual membership across the year.

On 1 January 2016, we implemented a new payments infrastructure that allows us to track detailed information about payments, including the time when we successfully process pledges for each creator’s account. For all pledges processed prior to 1 January 2016, we estimated the month in which pledges processed by assigning each pledge to the month after the creator performed the associated work. For creators paid on a monthly basis, pledges processed before 1 January 2016 are mapped to the month immediately following each month of the creator’s page. For creators paid per-post, pledges processed before 1 January 2016 are mapped to the month after the creator published the paid posts. We did this because Patreon processes pledges in the first month following any published work, and it’s correct unless a pledge declines and the patron takes more than a month to resolve the payment settings issue. If you have any questions about the timing associated with processed pledges, please contact us through the form pasted below.

Pledge growth

• Month: A 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 preceding month.
• Increased Pledges: The value and number of pledges that increased in value. The amount shown is the amount which existing pledges increased. For example, if a patron pledged £10 to you last month and increased the pledge to £15 this month, then this column would show £5 in increased pledges this month.
• Deleted Pledges: 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 this month. 
• Decreased Pledges: The value and number of pledges that decreased in value. The amount shown is the amount which existing pledges decreased. For example, if a patron pledged £15 to you last month and decreased the pledge to £10 this month, then this column would show £5 in decreased pledges this month.
• Total Change: The amount by which your total pledges and number of patrons changed over the course of the month.
• Amount Pledged at End of Month: The amount pledged to your page at the end of the month, along with the total number of patrons.

• This dashboard aggregates each patron’s changes over the course of each month. For example, if a new patron pledged £10 to you on 2 January, decreased the pledge to £5 on 4 January, increased the pledge to £20 on 5 January, and then left the pledge unchanged through the end of January, then it would appear as one new pledge of £20 in January. This dashboard wouldn’t show all of the individual increases and decreases.
• For creators with charge up-front: If someone pledges £X to a Charge Up-Front creator on 6 February, but then deletes their pledge on 10 February, it doesn't appear at all as a new or deleted pledge in the Pledge Growth dashboard in February (because this dashboard aggregates the patron's net behaviour over the course of a month). In this case, the patron paid the creator when they created their subscription, so the Earnings dashboard would show £X for that pledge in February, even though the Pledge Growth dashboard would not include the new or deleted pledge and would show £0 as the "amount pledged at the end of the month.”
• For creators who are paid per-post: This dashboard shows the base amount of the subscription. For example, if a patron subscribes at £5 per post, this 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.  
• If a patron’s payment is declined, but they haven’t deleted their subscription, their pledge will still appear in this dashboard. This dashboard shows how many patrons have pledges, inclusive of any pledges with a declined payment transaction.
• Detailed pledge data from December 2015 onwards can be downloaded via the CSV download link.

Patronage

• Month: The month for which the patron paid.
• Paying Patrons: The number of patrons with successfully-processed pledges for that month
• Pledges Processed: The amount of successfully-processed pledges for that month, less any refunded payments
• New Paying Patrons: The number of new patrons in that month
• Pledges Processed From New Patrons: The value of pledges processed from new patrons (i.e., the value of the first month paid by the new 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. 

Note that this is only available on the Pro and Premium creator plans.

Refunds

• Refund Date: The date when Patreon successfully processed the refund
• Original Transaction Date: The date when the pledge was originally processed
• Patron Name: The patron's first and last name
• Patron Email: The patron's email address
• Creator’s share:The amount deducted from the creator balance and refunded to the patron.
• Other:Patreon’s fee, processing fees, and Value-Added Tax refunded to the patron. Note that Patreon refunds these to the patron and bears the costs; the creator does not bear these costs.
• Total refund: The total amount refunded to the patron.

As a general rule, Patreon refers patrons to their creator whenever a patron requests a refund. Patreon only issues refunds directly to patrons under exceptional circumstances. For example, if Patreon accidentally charges a patron’s pledge multiple times, Patreon will directly issue a refund to the patron. Patreon also issues refunds in certain cases of fraudulent or unauthorised transactions (i.e., if the patron tells their bank that the pledge was an unauthorised transaction). That’s why a creator might occasionally see refunds that they didn’t initiate themselves.

Detailed refund data is available via the CSV download link for work published on 1 December 2015 or later.

Please consult our Help Centre article here for more information about refunds.

Declines

• Month: The month for which the patron paid (or should have paid). For per-post creators, this is the month in which the associated posts were published.
• Attempted Pledges: The value of attempted pledges for work performed in that month
• Declined: The value of pledges that did not get processed successfully
• Successful: The value of pledges that were processed successfully

Note: The Declines section of your Creator Dashboard summarises your patrons' overall decline rate. If you access this dashboard at the beginning of a month, the current month's decline rate typically exceeds the rate of prior months. This is normal. The overall decline rate is usually high in the first few days of the month, and it falls over time as we automatically retry payments and encourage patrons to update their payment methods. You can also download a detailed CSV of declines to review.

Payouts

• Month: The month in which the transaction processed
• Funds transferred to you:Funds deducted from the creator balance and transferred to the creator’s personal account, such as Direct Deposit or PayPal. Note that the actual amount that you receive in your bank account will be slightly smaller than the amount you withdraw because payment processors charge fees for the transfer.
• Funds used for pledges to other creators: Funds deducted from the creator balance in order to pay pledges to other creators
• Total funds deducted from creator balance: The sum of the preceding two columns

• A = The sum of all “earnings before tax” from the Earnings dashboard. This will capture all of the funds that have flowed into your balance.
• B = The sum of all “total funds deducted from creator balance” from the Payouts dashboard. This will capture all of the funds that have flowed out of your balance.
• Creator Balance = A - B. 
• The only exceptions are adjustments to your creator balance that aren’t captured in the dashboards, such as those associated with Webtoons corporate patronage, account adjustments associated with fraudulent or disputed transactions, or account adjustments related to Patreon Capital or other types of advances.
  
  

Taxes