Payout: When do I get paid?

Last updated: August 25, 2026

This article is about when your practice is paid by Alpaca. If you are looking for when your staff are paid, see 📄 Payroll Schedule: when do staff get paid?— different flow, same two-week calendar.

The cycle

Confirm by and Pay date for the selected period, on the Payout overview panel.

Alpaca pays out on a fixed biweekly cycle. Each payout period runs Monday to Sunday over two weeks, and has two dates that matter to you:

Confirm by — the Monday after the period closes, when Alpaca confirms the payout for the period.
Pay date — when the transfer goes out to your bank.

Both dates are shown on the Payout overview panel of the Finances page, along with a Landing on [date] label. Those are always the authoritative dates for the period you are looking at.

What decides whether work is in this payout

Inclusion is based on when the session note was SIGNED — not the date of service, and not when insurance pays.

A session delivered on the 3rd whose note is signed on the 5th is in the period containing the 5th. The same session signed on the 20th is in the next period. This is the same rule payroll uses, which is why signing notes promptly moves both your staff's pay and your practice's cash.

You do not wait for insurance. Alpaca pays the insurance-reimbursable share on the biweekly cycle regardless of whether the claim has been adjudicated — that is the point of the guarantee.

The money arrives in more than one instalment

For any given session, your practice is typically paid across two or three payouts:

The signed-notes payout, in the period the note was signed. This is the insurance-reimbursable share of your contracted rate.
A reconciliation adjustment, in the period after insurance finalizes the claim, correcting the estimate up or down.
The patient responsibility payout, in the period after the family pays their share.

So a quiet period is not necessarily a small period — it may be carrying reconciliations and patient payments from months of earlier work.

What if insurance denies the claim?

You keep the signed-notes payout. Alpaca absorbs a full denial rather than clawing the money back — again, that is the guarantee. See Understanding the Finances page for the full picture.

If a family never pays their share, you simply never receive that last instalment for those claims. Alpaca handles patient billing and collections.

Why a payout might be smaller than you expected

Notes signed after the period closed rolled into the next one.
A negative reconciliation adjustment: an earlier estimate of the patient's share was too low, so the difference comes off this payout.
A manual adjustment. See Manual adjustments and when they happen.
Notes excluded from the period — the overview shows an Excluded figure when this happens.