Your Referral partner account has, on its own record, two fields the Platform's staff can configure: a commission **Percentage** and validity **Months** (0 = indefinite). If nothing else was indicated when you signed up, the default value is **20% for 12 months**. At the exact instant one of your referrals verifies their email (section 2), the system copies the % and months **in effect at that moment** and saves them as a "snapshot" of THAT specific referral — not a reference to your account's current value. > **Important — Changing your commission never rewrites what's already frozen** > > If staff raises or lowers your percentage afterward, that change **only affects referrals that sign up from that point on**. Referrals that already existed keep the % and months they had the day they verified their email — forever. This guarantees that a commission you already agreed on with a customer you brought in a while ago never gets "trimmed" retroactively. The validity months define that referral's **commission window**: it counts from the **first invoice that customer actually pays** (section 5) — never from sign-up or email verification — for the number of frozen months. With **0 months**, the window is indefinite — the referral keeps generating commission as long as they stay signed up, with no cut-off date. > **Note — The clock starts with the first payment, not the sign-up** > > While that customer is in their free trial — or any time before they've paid any invoice — their status is **Active** (section 4) and their months window **hasn't even started counting**: a long trial doesn't "eat into" the partner's commission months. As soon as that first paid invoice arrives — by Stripe or by a manual payment on record, section 5 — the system fixes that date **forever** as the window's starting point; the sign-up date and the email verification date stop mattering for this calculation. While the window hasn't started, the "Window until" column in your Referrals table shows *"Starts with their first payment"* instead of a date (section 4).