What Are Obligations?
An obligation is Siren's record that a collaborator is owed money. This page explains how obligations are created, their statuses, and how they become payouts.
Last updated: April 10, 2026
An obligation is Siren’s record that a collaborator is owed a specific amount of money for a specific reason. Each obligation ties one collaborator to one conversion (or to one distribution period, in the case of distributors) and carries the calculated reward amount. Think of obligations as Siren’s accounts-payable backlog for your affiliate program.
How obligations are created
Most obligations come from approved conversions. When a customer buys something and the conversion that results is approved, Siren runs the program’s incentive structure against the underlying transaction, works out the reward amount, and creates an obligation for the collaborator. If the program is configured to auto-approve conversions, this happens the moment the sale lands. If you hold conversions in pending for review, the obligation is created when you approve them.
Distributors create obligations on a different cadence. Instead of creating one obligation per sale, a distributor accumulates metric data over a tracking period and then creates obligations in a batch when the distribution triggers on schedule.
Obligation statuses
Every obligation carries one of three statuses. A pending obligation is waiting to be included in a fulfillment. A complete obligation has been tallied into a fulfillment and turned into a payout record. A rejected obligation has been invalidated and will not be paid, which happens when you reject it manually or when a refund automatically reverses the conversion that created it.
Rejecting an obligation is the last checkpoint before money leaves your business. It’s how you catch non-compliant conversions, fraudulent activity, or discrepancies that didn’t surface during conversion review.
Paying obligations
Obligations don’t become real payments on their own. You pay them by creating a fulfillment, which gathers all the pending obligations you want to settle, totals them by collaborator, and turns each total into a payout record. Once an obligation is rolled into a fulfillment, its status moves to complete and it won’t be picked up by future fulfillments.
The What is a Fulfillment? page walks through the fulfillment side of this process in more detail.
For developers: This concept maps to the
ObligationIssuedevent. See the events reference for the full pipeline.