When you get paid: how the QCS remittance cycle actually works

The question every seller asks before the first parcel moves is when the money arrives. The honest answer has two parts: when the balance becomes yours, and when it leaves our bank for yours. They are different moments and conflating them is how couriers end up accused of holding cash they have already credited.

Your balance moves the moment a parcel is delivered

There is no nightly batch. When a rider marks a parcel delivered with proof attached, the delivery charge is computed, a balanced double-entry journal is posted, and your payable balance is credited with the COD amount less that charge. All of it inside one database transaction, so the parcel and the ledger cannot disagree.

That means your statement is current, not a day behind. A parcel delivered at four in the afternoon is on your balance at four in the afternoon.

The payout is a separate, deliberate step

Crediting a balance is accounting. Moving money is a bank transfer, and it is done by a person against a funded account with evidence attached. Three rules govern it, and none of them is negotiable.

• Finance funds a bank account before anything is paid out of it. A payout against an unfunded balance is refused outright rather than queued
• A payout can never exceed the available funded balance on that account
• Every payout carries the transfer proof as an upload, and once posted it is immutable. A correction is a reversing entry, never an edit

The third one is the reason you can audit us. A posted entry that could be edited is not a record, it is a draft.

What is deducted, and what is not

The only thing taken off a delivered parcel is the delivery charge for that parcel, computed from its own weight and zone against the rate card version that was live when you booked it. Lahore City starts at PKR 180 for the first half kilo and steps by PKR 40. The extended area adds a flat PKR 50 once. Those figures include sales tax and the fuel adjustment, so nothing is added afterwards.

A parcel that was not delivered is not charged at all. A failed collection, a refusal at the door, a parcel returned to you: none of them reduce your balance. The published tariff carries the two narrow exceptions, both of which need evidence and are applied by the back office rather than automatically.

Why a new rate card never changes an old parcel

Rate cards are versioned and dated. A parcel carries the version that priced it, frozen into its own charge snapshot at booking. Publishing a new card does not reach backwards, so a tariff change cannot quietly reprice work you have already done. Merchants are told before a new card takes effect, which is a tariff term rather than a courtesy.

The same applies if you are on an agreed rate rather than the published one. Your booking screen and your statement both show the rate that applies to you, computed by the same engine that prices the parcel, so the figure you are quoted and the figure you are charged come from one place.

The three questions to settle before you start

1. 01What is the payout cadence, and is it a cadence or a promise
2. 02Is the balance credited at delivery or at invoice, because the gap between those is where cash sits
3. 03Can you see, per parcel, the charge that was taken and the rate card version it came from

We answer the second and third in the product rather than in a sales conversation: credited at delivery, and yes, per parcel, with the version named. The cadence is agreed with you at onboarding, because a seller shipping four hundred parcels a month and a seller shipping thirty do not want the same schedule.

Keeping your payout account current

The account we pay into lives on your own settings page and you maintain it. Change it there rather than telling a rider or a support agent, because a bank detail passed verbally is a bank detail nobody can audit. Changes are logged, and a change is a privileged action rather than a form field, for the obvious reason.

If you have not started yet, the merchant signup form is the entry point. Work out what a parcel will cost you first on the pricing calculator, so the payout figures are not a surprise.