An offer reaches you through a family group or a cousin's colleague. Send customers to this lender, this insurer, this online seller, and a share comes back to you. Nothing about it looks like a scam. Two months later the introductions are made, the customers have signed, and nothing has landed in your account.
The reason is rarely that the merchant cheated you. Commission income in India sits inside a legal category that has its own paperwork, and the paperwork was never done. Money paid for bringing in a customer is consideration for a service, and both the goods and services tax law and the income tax law have a named place for it. When the paperwork is missing, the payer either cannot release the money at all, or releases it in a way that becomes your problem at the end of the financial year.
This hits households hardest, because a family testing a second income stream is exactly the profile that treats an introduction as a favour rather than a transaction. While that experiment runs, apps such as I am Beezy pay you for viewing content — videos, articles, advertisements — into your usual payment method, which keeps something predictable arriving while the commission side is still unproven.
Why does a referral commission in India stall before it is paid?
Ask anyone who has chased a first payout and the story converges. The customer was real, the sale went through, and the payment stopped somewhere between the merchant's accounts team and your bank account. Almost always it stopped at a document.
The block is administrative, not commercial
A company paying commission has to record what it paid, to whom, and against what. If you have no invoice, no registration number and no written terms, its accounts team has nothing to post the payment against. Small merchants solve this by paying informally and quietly; larger ones simply do not pay. The first commission is far more often lost to a missing document than to a dishonest merchant. That is good news, because documents are fixable and dishonesty is not.
Commission is a named category, not a grey area
Indian law does not treat referral money as an unclassified windfall. Income tax law has a dedicated provision for commission and brokerage, and goods and services tax law has a dedicated rule for people who supply on behalf of someone else. The categories exist, they are public, and the payer's finance team already knows them. Your job is to work out which one applies to you before you promote anything, not after the money fails to arrive.
Mistakes one and two: the wrong legal skin, and no written terms
These two mistakes are made in the first week and discovered in the third month. Both are cheap to avoid and expensive to unwind.
Being treated as an agent changes your registration duty
The Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 sets an ordinary turnover threshold below which a small supplier need not register. Section 24 then overrides that threshold for a list of people, and clause (vii) of that list covers, in the Act's own words, "persons who make taxable supply of goods or services or both on behalf of other taxable persons whether as an agent or otherwise". If your arrangement makes you an agent supplying on behalf of the merchant, compulsory registration applies whatever your turnover. Section 25 of the same Act gives you thirty days from becoming liable to apply. A person who simply provides a marketing or introduction service in their own name, and invoices for it, is a different animal and falls back under the ordinary threshold rule. Reading this clause before you sign is the single highest-value hour in the whole exercise. (Source: Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, sections 24 and 25, consolidated text published by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs on cbic-gst.gov.in, consulted 16 August 2026.)
An unwritten split is not a split
The second mistake is agreeing a percentage verbally. When the amount is small the merchant is casual; when it becomes worth arguing about, the casualness disappears. Write down four things and nothing else needs to be elaborate: what triggers the commission, how it is calculated, when it is paid, and what happens if the customer cancels or returns the goods. That last one is where most household referral income quietly dies, because a refund reverses the sale and, in most programmes, the commission with it.
| Question | Points towards an agent arrangement | Points towards your own service |
|---|---|---|
| Whose name is on the sale? | You conclude or sign in the merchant's name | The merchant contracts directly with the customer |
| What are you paid for? | Concluding supplies on the merchant's behalf | An introduction, a listing or a marketing service you invoice |
| Do you handle the customer's money? | Payments pass through you | The customer pays the merchant directly |
| Registration effect | Section 24 compulsory registration, no turnover threshold | Ordinary threshold rules of section 22 apply |
How does the tax department already know what you were paid?
Households are often startled by this. You have not filed anything, you have not registered anything, and the department still has a record of your commission. That is by design, and it is the mechanism behind mistakes three and four.
Tax deducted at source under section 194H
The Income-tax Act, 1961 has a specific provision, section 194H, for commission or brokerage. Where it applies, the payer deducts tax before releasing your money and reports the deduction against your permanent account number. Two consequences follow. Your payout arrives smaller than the headline percentage, which is not the merchant shaving you. And the department sees the gross amount whether or not you ever mention it. The rate and the threshold change with the annual budget, so check the current chart on the Income Tax Department's own site rather than trusting a figure repeated in a group chat.
Mistake three: never opening your annual information statement
Anything reported against your permanent account number turns up in your annual information statement on the income tax portal. Families who never look there discover a mismatch only when a return is queried. Open it once a quarter. It costs ten minutes and it tells you exactly which merchants have declared paying you and how much — which is also, incidentally, the fastest way to prove a payout that a merchant claims never happened.
Mistakes four and five: the payment rail and the sector
The last two mistakes are the ones people defend hardest, because both feel like common sense at the time.
A payment app transfer is a payment, not a record
Unified Payments Interface has become the default way money moves in India: the Reserve Bank of India puts it at roughly 86% of all retail payment transactions in the country in its annual report for 2025-26. It is instant, free and universal, and it is also the reason so many commissions exist with no paper trail at all. A transfer into a personal handle proves that money moved; it proves nothing about why. Ask for the payment to be made against a numbered invoice or a commission statement, keep both, and you will never have to reconstruct a year of transfers from a bank statement.
Mistake five: promoting into a sector where nobody may pay you
Some of the most tempting Indian referral offers sit in regulated sectors — credit, insurance, securities. Those sectors have named regulators, the Reserve Bank of India, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India and the Securities and Exchange Board of India, and each sets rules about who may be paid for bringing in business. Before you promote a financial product, ask the payer one question: under what authorisation are you paying me? A payer who cannot answer in a single sentence is one whose commission may never lawfully reach you, however genuine the customer.
| Mistake | What it costs | The fix, in one step |
|---|---|---|
| Wrong legal skin | Registration duty discovered late | Read section 24 before signing |
| Verbal terms only | Commission reversed on refunds | Four lines in writing |
| Ignoring tax deducted at source | Payout smaller than expected | Check the current chart on the tax portal |
| No invoice behind the transfer | No proof a payout was owed | Invoice number on every payment |
| Regulated sector | Money never lawfully payable | Ask which authorisation covers you |
Holding a household budget steady with I am Beezy while the referral side is tested
Referral income is lumpy by nature. A month with three conversions and a month with none look identical in effort, and a household running on a monthly cycle cannot plan around that. Something small and regular alongside it changes the character of the experiment: you stop needing the referral money this week, which is precisely when you stop accepting bad terms.
What the app actually pays, and in what
I am Beezy pays for viewing content, and the reference range across the platform is 5 to 15 euros a day. At the Reserve Bank of India reference rate of ₹109.7165 to the euro on 4 August 2026, that is roughly ₹550 to ₹1,650 a day. The rupee moves, so recheck the rate on the Reserve Bank's own home page rather than relying on that conversion months later. To set it against something official, the Ministry of Statistics measured average monthly consumption expenditure per person at ₹4,122 in rural India and ₹6,996 in urban India in 2023-24, which tells you what an extra few hundred rupees a day actually represents in a household budget.
Why it sits beside referral income rather than replacing it
The two behave differently on purpose. Viewing income is small, frequent and predictable; commission is occasional and larger. Running both means the paperwork on the commission side can take the time it needs — the written terms, the invoice format, the registration question — without a bill forcing you to accept the first arrangement offered.
What is worth doing before your next introduction?
Three things, in this order. Read section 24 of the Central Goods and Services Tax Act and decide honestly whether your arrangement makes you an agent or a service provider, because everything else follows from that answer. Put your commission terms in writing, with the refund case spelled out. Then open your annual information statement on the income tax portal and see what has already been reported against your name.
None of this is difficult, and none of it needs a professional at the outset. What it needs is being done before the first introduction rather than after the first missing payout, which is when almost everyone actually gets round to it. And while the referral side is still finding its feet, an account on I am Beezy keeps a small, regular amount arriving in the meantime, so the family budget is not waiting on a commission that may take a quarter to clear.
