Follow-up: delayed delivery of August payouts and UB Revenue Report [Fixed]

Bella

Update (11:00 am PT, October 13) Good news! This issue has now been fixed and you should be able to see your September UB revenue normally. Additionally, as promised, our official documentation on the payment schedule for Udemy Business has been properly updated. Thank you once again for your patience!

Update (16:30 pm PT, October 12) The financial figures (the human-involved part that makes it unfeasible to provide reporting immediately after the month closes) are finalized. The system that calculates each instructor’s share of the pot, including applying withholding tax and co-instructor splits, has been impacted by the same migration work that impacted the payout of August earnings. Our team is working to resolve this issue as swiftly as possible, and we apologize again for the delay.

Update (15:20 pm PT, October 12) The Engineering team just informed us that they have attempted multiple fixes, and unfortunately, the process of updating the Revenue Report failed. A larger change is scheduled to be deployed tomorrow morning, so it's unlikely we'll have a resolution before then. We are truly sorry for this inconvenience. As more information about this technical issue becomes available, we will keep you posted.

Update (11:30 am PT, October 12) Our team has been alerted about a delay in the Udemy Business Revenue Report and is currently working on a solution. We will also be updating our documentation to be more clear about when Udemy Business earnings are posted to the Revenue Report to set better expectations for the future. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience and cooperation as our team looks into this. We will update you in this thread if there are any new announcements.

Hi all,

I'm writing to provide an update on the delay that affected the most recent instructor payout.

As we reported Friday, we encountered a number of problems in delivering August payouts, ultimately resulting in payment being issued early Saturday, October 8 versus our expected date of October 7. Instructors using direct US bank transfer for payout have seen a further delay, since money sent by Udemy isn't distributed by banking partners outside of operating hours (including weekends), and Monday the 10th was a US bank holiday. We've received confirmation from our banking partner that these payments are set to be delivered today, Tuesday the 11th.

Some of you asked for an explanation of what went wrong this month. The root cause of the delay was a series of setbacks with migration from our legacy payments system to a new one. This new system will ultimately enable quicker payment processing, as well as open up the door for potential payout improvements in the future, such as automated reattempts of failed payouts. Unfortunately, despite testing conducted before the day of payout, we encountered challenges with this first live use of the new system. Furthermore, because this was our first time using it, we had several additional steps and checks to ensure payouts were delivered correctly, so each issue took more time than usual to resolve and re-check.

We take our responsibility to get you paid accurately and on time seriously, and we're sincerely sorry it didn't happen this time. We look forward to delivering a smooth, timely payout of September earnings next month.

Teach on,
Katie & the Instructor Team

DamianMcKinnon

I know hindsight is 20/20 but perhaps letting people know that you were rolling out a new system before the payments executed would have helped. For me at least it was the uncertainty and lack of explanation that got my back up. I've seen payrolls go awry before and normally it's something as simple as somebody making a mistake or forgetting to submit on time and it displaces everyone who is relying on that money. Days of not explaining the issue just increases stress levels more. For me it was a rates payment on a piece of land - late payment attracts penalties. I could see from the thread as it grew that it was a similar story for other people. No doubt stress levels were higher at Udemy too. Hopefully everything is resolved now and it's blue skies for all moving forward.

And kudos for those of you who stood up during this rollout to interact with the instructors.

DiogoAlvesd487

Thanks for clarifying and explaining what happened!

Similar comment as @DamianMcKinnon
, perhaps Udemy could give itself a buffer when rolling new payment systems. For example, in this case, the team could have started the payment on the 6th and had a 1-day buffer if something went wrong.

MinervaSingh66

Hello. I am yet to receive an update on last month's UFB payments

Bella

Hi @DamianMcKinnon
and @DiogoAlvesd487
Thank you so much for your thoughtful feedback. This is definitely something we will work to be mindful of moving forward.

Hi @MinervaSingh66
, thanks for reporting and I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Our engineers are currently reviewing this issue, but we've posted an update in the original post and will make sure to come back with news once we have more information. Thank you for your patience!

Bella Almeida

Udemy Community

MichaelPog

Thank you @Bella
for the update and clarification. I really appreciate it.

I do want to point out that this is the second migration in the last few months that went terribly wrong.

The first one was the daily email reports which is still down by the way.

And this is the second issue with the revenue report this month.

My revenue was entirely messed up for weeks until very recently.

I'm not blaming anyone and I understand the challenges in migrations between systems.

But as others have pointed out, those ongoing production issues reduce the confidence we have in Udemy and create unnecessary stress for everyone.

So I hope that besides a proper and prompt fix to this issue, there's a bigger postmortem on all of this situation and proper action items are taken to avoid those issues in the future.

This high frequency of breakage is NOT ok.

Bella

Hi @MichaelPog
, we appreciate your understanding and the support you and many other instructors have shown to the team during this time.

As a team, we’re conducting a retrospective to dive deeper into what went wrong, how it can be prevented in the future, and what we can do to mitigate and communicate when issues do arise.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us – we take feedback seriously and will use them in our continuous improvement efforts!

Bella Almeida

Udemy Community