Partner payments

Overview on partner payments

Payments to you are determined based on the date of the invoice to the customer (generally the date of purchase or the future start date for a private offer). Subsequent or recurring invoices are billed on the anniversary date (the same day of the month as the original invoice) and are not adjusted to align on the first of the month. IBM does not wait for customer payment before paying you.

Note: A single customer purchase may result in multiple customer invoices, depending on the billing terms that were setup for that transaction. For example, a subscription can be set up to bill monthly, quarterly or yearly, or the entire committed term up-front.

Payments to you are made automatically on a regular schedule. You do not need to submit invoices to IBM for payment. Payments are made within 31 days of the customer invoice date. For example, if a client purchase is made on 1 May, IBM will remit payment to your bank account by 1 June. After remittance, you will receive a notification by email, postal mail, or both.

Red Hat Marketplace provides a partner revenue report to you that shows details for all customer invoices for your products. You can use this partner revenue report to reconcile with the remittance amount. This partner revenue report is continuously updated as customer invoices are processed. It may take several days after the purchase before a customer invoice is fully processed and available in the report (this does not affect the date of the invoice used to determine when payment is due to you). The partner revenue report can be downloaded from the Partner Portal at any time. An example partner revenue report (.xlsx format), with a description of the data fields is available here.

Before IBM can pay you there is some required information needed that is collected as part of your company account set up. You will need to submit a tax form and an Electronic Funds Transfer form with confirmation of your bank information. Submission of these forms is done in the Partner Portal, Payments section.


Tax forms

You will need to complete and submit the following US Internal Revenue Service forms:

  • For companies based in the U.S., Form W-9
  • For companies based outside of the U.S., Form W-8

Electronic Funds Transfer forms

You will need to complete and submit an EFT form so IBM can remit payments to your bank account:


Payment reports

After payment setup, for revenue and payment information, refer to the following report on the Partner Portal:

The report includes details from client billings, which make up the payment amount for that month. An example partner revenue report (.xlsx format), with a description of the data fields is available here.

For more information, refer to Partner reports.


Access forms and reports on Partner Portal

Procedure