Revenue Share: Paying Out on What the Laptop Sold For, Not What It Looked Like
Where the value on a revenue-share settlement line comes from, what the amber Estimate badge is warning you about, and why Calculate is worth pressing twice.
A grader writes 180 euros next to a ThinkPad on a Tuesday. Six weeks later it leaves in an auction lot, and the lot fetches rather more than anyone expected. The client’s contract says they get a percentage of what their fleet brought in. A percentage of which number? Under a revenue-share contract the platform answers with the second one: what the device actually sold for.
The basis of a line
Every line on a revenue-share settlement carries a value basis, and there are three of them. A device sold on its own takes the price from its direct sale line. A device that left inside a batch takes its share of what that batch brought in — a Market deal that closed won, or a settled auction lot — with the total spread across the units in proportion to their list price, and the rounding remainder landing on the last weighted unit. A server and a monitor in the same lot do not get the same slice. A device that was recycled or scrapped without a sale counts zero, because zero is what it brought in.
The amber one
Only a device that has not sold yet falls back to its grading estimate as a stand-in, and the line says so with an amber Estimate badge. The financial overview counts the three bases side by side — so many units at sale price, so many at estimate, so many recycled — with a hint to calculate again once the estimated ones sell. Amber rather than red: nothing is broken, but this number is going to change. While the settlement is still a draft, Calculate re-reads the sale prices and writes the lines back. Press it the day before you approve, not the week after.
Currencies are not blended
A sale recorded in a different currency from the settlement’s is ignored rather than converted, and that device falls back to its estimate instead. This looks strict and is meant to: an estimate that announces itself in amber is safer inside a payout than a conversion nobody noticed happening. Lines written before this rule existed simply carry no basis at all.
What the report totals
On the printable settlement report each line carries its basis in its own column, and under a revenue share the Net footer is the customer’s share minus the costs — not the gross value minus the costs. The footer and the lines agree, which is the entire job of a document you hand to a client.
Contracts that have no tariff yet
A revenue-share percentage is a tariff like any other, alongside the per-unit rate, the per-kilo rate and the fixed fee — and those three compute straight from their tariff and carry no basis. The create-contract screen hints when the model you picked has no tariff filled in, activating one anyway needs a confirmation checkbox, and New settlement declines an order whose contract still has none. Explaining a payout of zero to a client is not a conversation anyone schedules twice.