A neighbour asks which broadband provider you use. You send the referral link your provider gave you, they sign up, and weeks later a payment appears with a reference you do not recognise. That is commission, and from the moment it reaches you it is ordinary income in Denmark. The earning is not the difficult part. Introducing business is legal, common, and built into entire sectors here. The difficult part is the paperwork nobody hands you: whether this counts as a leisure activity or a trade, whether you need a CVR number, which line of your tax assessment it belongs on, and what has to exist before the money moves so that it actually lands. In a household this matters more than for a single person, because several people under one roof can each be collecting small amounts from different places at once, including an app such as I am Beezy, where viewing content generates a modest daily top-up paid out to a local payment method. The same question comes up every time. Where does it go, and who declares it.
What kind of payment is a referral commission?
Before any question of status, be precise about what the payment is for. Three arrangements that look identical on a bank statement behave differently the moment there is a dispute or a tax return to file.
An introduction fee is paid once, for one act
You put two parties in contact, they do business, you are paid. There is no ongoing obligation and no responsibility for what happens next. This is the version most likely to be arranged verbally, which is exactly why it generates arguments about whether the introduction was genuinely yours. An introduction fee is only enforceable if both sides agreed the trigger and the amount before the introduction took place. After the customer has signed, your leverage is gone.
An affiliate commission is a standing offer you accept
Here you are not negotiating anything. A company publishes programme terms, gives you a tracking link or a code, and its own system decides which sales are attributed to you. You accept the terms as written, including the parts that let the company change the rate, void a commission on a cancelled order, or close the programme. Read the attribution rules and the payment schedule before you promote anything, because those two clauses decide whether you get paid at all.
A discount on your own purchase is a different animal
Cashback schemes and member rebates that reduce what you personally paid are generally treated as a price reduction rather than as income, because no service was rendered to anyone. The line blurs the moment you start receiving money for other people's purchases. If your arrangement mixes the two, separate them in your own records from day one and confirm the treatment with skat.dk rather than assuming the whole lot falls under the same heading.
Do you need a CVR number to be paid?
This is where most people freeze, usually because they picture company formation, an accountant and a filing calendar. None of that is the starting point. Denmark gives you a ladder, and the sensible move is to stand on the lowest rung that honestly fits what you are doing.
The occasional route: declared, but not a registered business
If the activity is small, irregular and clearly secondary to your main income, it may fall on the non-commercial side of the line that SKAT draws between a leisure activity and self-employment. That does not make it invisible. The surplus is still declared on your annual assessment. What changes is the treatment: on the non-commercial side you are generally taxed on the surplus of the activity itself, and your ability to deduct costs is limited to what that same activity earned in the year.
The business route: registration through Virk
When the activity becomes regular, planned and aimed at profit, it is a trade, and a trade is registered with the Danish Business Authority through virk.dk. You receive a CVR number, which is what lets you invoice properly, and you take on the reporting that goes with it. Registration is done with MitID and does not require a company structure — a sole proprietorship is the common form for someone starting from a spare room.
What tips the assessment from one side to the other
SKAT does not apply a single test. It looks at the whole picture: how systematic the activity is, whether it is run in a professional manner, whether it is realistically capable of producing a profit, how much of your income it represents and whether you are investing in it. An activity that has become your main source of income is treated as a business regardless of what you call it. If you are near the line, the safe move is to register rather than argue about it later.
| Question | Occasional activity | Registered business |
|---|---|---|
| How you set it up | Nothing to register | CVR number via virk.dk with MitID |
| How income is declared | Surplus on the annual assessment | Business result on the assessment |
| Costs you can deduct | Limited to what the activity earned | Ordinary operating costs of the trade |
| Invoicing a company | Awkward, often refused | Normal, with your CVR on the invoice |
| VAT question | Does not arise | Arises once turnover passes the registration threshold |
| Who to ask | skat.dk | skat.dk and virk.dk |
Setting up the route the money takes
Status settles what you owe. The payment route settles whether the money turns up. These are separate problems and people routinely solve only the first one.
NemKonto is the destination, not the mechanism
Every person and business in Denmark has a NemKonto, an ordinary bank account designated to receive payments from public authorities. It is where a tax refund lands. It is not automatically where a private payer sends commission — a company or a platform pays to the account details you give it. Give the same account every time and keep it separate in your own head from the account your salary uses, so that the incoming amounts are easy to recognise months later.
Payments from abroad add a conversion step
Many affiliate programmes and platforms are not Danish. When a payer settles in another currency, a conversion happens somewhere, and the rate plus any handling charge is applied by whoever performs it. Ask the payer which currency it settles in and check what your own bank charges to receive it. Where a payment processor holds a balance for you before transferring, find out what triggers the transfer and whether a minimum applies, because a balance that never reaches the release point is a payment you will chase for months.
Keep the evidence the payer will not keep for you
Programme dashboards are rewritten, closed and reset. Once a quarter, export or screenshot the statement showing what was earned and what was paid, and file it with the bank entry. If your treatment is ever questioned, the reconstruction is trivial with those two documents side by side and painful without them.
| Payment route | Typical use | What to check before relying on it |
|---|---|---|
| Bank transfer from a Danish payer | Local partners, suppliers, employers | Payment terms and the reference used |
| Bank transfer from abroad | International programmes | Settlement currency and receiving charges |
| Platform balance released on request | Apps and affiliate networks | Release conditions and identity checks |
| MobilePay between private individuals | Informal arrangements | That the arrangement is documented elsewhere |
Adding a steady line to the household budget with I am Beezy
Referral income is lumpy by nature. It arrives when someone else decides to buy, which may be this month or never. A household budget built on it alone is a budget that swings, so the useful counterweight is something regular and small rather than occasional and large.
Where a viewing app sits next to referral income
I am Beezy works on a different mechanism from an affiliate link: you view content — videos, articles, advertising — and each view generates a payment credited to your account, released to your usual payment method. There is no third party to convince and no sale to wait for, which is precisely why it behaves differently in a budget. It produces a supplementary daily income rather than an unpredictable one, and it does not compete for the same attention as a referral arrangement you are already running.
Treat it like every other payment: record it
The habit that keeps all of this manageable is the same regardless of source. One line per payment, the date, the payer, the amount, and a note about what it was for. Households that skip this are not caught out by the tax question but by the memory question, when someone has to explain in March what a payment from the previous August actually was.
What should you agree before you introduce anyone?
Most commission disputes are not about dishonesty. They are about two people remembering a conversation differently, months apart, with money on the table. Written terms are not a sign of distrust in Denmark; they are how business is normally done.
The trigger, in one sentence
Define the exact event that earns the commission and write it down before the introduction. Is it the introduction itself, the signed contract, the first invoice, or the invoice actually being paid? Each is defensible, and each produces a completely different outcome if the customer signs and then walks away. One sentence in an email, confirmed by reply, settles it.
The clawback clause nobody reads
Affiliate terms almost always allow a commission to be reversed if the underlying sale is cancelled, refunded, or judged fraudulent. That is reasonable in principle and painful in practice if you have already spent the money. Find the clawback window in the terms, and treat commission as provisional until that window has closed rather than as income the day it appears.
Who owns the customer afterwards
An introduction usually ends your role. An ongoing commission on renewals does not, and the two are worth separating explicitly, because the party paying you has an obvious interest in reading a recurring arrangement as a one-off. Say which it is. If it is recurring, say for how long.
Keeping it clean across a full year
The last piece is maintenance. Commission income tends to arrive unevenly and then generate a surprise at assessment time, and the surprise is entirely avoidable.
The preliminary assessment is the tool for changing income
Your forskudsopgørelse is the projection your monthly tax is drawn from, and it can be updated at any point in the year on skat.dk. If a new income line has started, adjusting the projection spreads the effect across the remaining months instead of concentrating it into a single balance later. Updating the preliminary assessment when income changes is what prevents an unexpected tax bill at the end of the year.
A yearly review that takes an afternoon
Once a year, put the whole thing on one page: which arrangements are still live, which produced nothing and can be dropped, whether the level of activity has shifted your status from occasional to commercial, and whether the payment routes still work. Households doing this together usually find at least one dormant arrangement that has been quietly generating small payments nobody was tracking, and one that has been costing attention for no return.
None of this requires expertise. It requires deciding what the payment is for, being honest about whether the activity has become a trade, registering through virk.dk if it has, and writing down the trigger before you make the introduction. Do those four things and commission becomes an ordinary, boring part of the household's finances instead of a source of anxiety every spring. And if you want a steadier line underneath the unpredictable ones, I am Beezy pays for the time you already spend looking at content, which is the easiest kind of income to build a habit around.
