An affiliate program, end to end

Problem

Referrals arrived in a chat channel, were approved by hand, paid by hand, and confirmed by hand. Every payout was chased in messages and nothing recorded who had been paid.

What I built

• Intake: a referral posted in the channel becomes a record in a commission queue and a task for the person who owns it.
• Approval: the decision maker approves or declines from a card; the system records the outcome and asks the affiliate for payment details.
• Payout: when payment details arrive, the finance owner gets a task with everything attached; when it is paid, the affiliate gets a confirmation email and the ledger closes.
• A weekly broadcast to affiliates with the current promotion, gated by an approval card so nothing goes out unreviewed.
• An audit that reconciled months of history: unrecorded referrals added, stale rows closed, the state machine repaired after a regression had marked payouts as paid at approval.

Result

Every referral has a traceable lifecycle from post to payment. Nobody chases payouts in chat anymore.

What it shows

Workflow design as a state machine with a human at each decision point, and the discipline to reconcile history rather than start the ledger over.