Why claims get rejected, and the three-month cure period

Most companies joining the programme expect rejection to be common. In practice it is not. The programme is set up to pay out, the review is a check on your paperwork and not a judgement on your business, and you usually get a second chance when something is wrong.

Almost everything that goes wrong falls into four categories, and three of them can be fixed after you have filed.

1. Missing the six-month window

This is the only failure that cannot be undone. Every payment carries its own six-month window from the payment document date, and for events the clock runs from the event's end date instead. File after that and the claim is gone, no matter how good the evidence is.

Companies rarely miss the deadline because they forgot about it. They miss it because they waited. A studio holds back a claim while it chases one missing invoice, or decides to file a whole year at once, and the oldest payments run out of time in the meantime. File what is ready and add the rest later. There is more detail in the six-month filing window.

2. Paying from the wrong account

Support is paid to the company, so the spending has to come from the company. Proof of payment means a bank statement, a SWIFT confirmation or a company card statement in the company's name. A founder's personal card, a director's personal account or a related company paying on your behalf will not support a claim, even where the invoice is addressed correctly.

This is the most common break we see in practice, and it happens because ad platforms and cloud providers make it so easy to leave a personal card on file. It is also the one most likely to be discovered months later, when the payment is already past saving.

3. Documents that disagree with each other

A claim is built from a contract or order confirmation, an invoice, and proof of payment. A reviewer reads all three together, and they have to describe the same transaction. Problems appear when the invoice is issued to a group parent rather than the Turkish entity, when the amount paid does not match the amount invoiced because of a partial payment or an FX difference, or when the contract describes a broader scope than the invoice covers.

None of this is fatal, and most of it is answerable with a short explanation and a supporting document. It does slow the file down, and a file that generates questions takes longer than a file that does not.

4. Thin evidence for the activity itself

Beyond the paper trail, each item has its own proof that the activity really was aimed at foreign markets. Advertising claims need campaign reports or screenshots that show the targeting. Store commission claims need the platform's payout report. Event claims need photographs of the stand and proof of participation. Certification claims need the certificate.

This evidence is easy to produce at the time and awkward to reconstruct a year later, once the campaign has been archived and the person who ran it has moved on.

The cure period

This is the part most people do not know about. If the reviewer finds something missing, your claim is not thrown out. You are told what is needed and given three months to send it, plus another three months if they ask for more after that. Only what is still missing when the time runs out is left out of the decision.

That time sits outside the original six-month filing window and does not eat into it. So a file that goes in on time with a gap in it is in a far better position than a perfect file that goes in late.

What this means for how you work

The practical conclusion is that the filing calendar deserves more attention than the paperwork does. Documents can be chased, corrected and completed. A closed window cannot be reopened.

We run clients on a monthly reconciliation and a quarterly filing cycle for that reason. Every payment is tagged to a support item on the day it clears, with its invoice, contract and payment record stored together, so that no payment is ever sitting close to the edge of its window and no evidence has to be reconstructed from memory.

Review normally takes one to three months once you have filed. What decides whether it is one month or three is how many questions your file raises. Keeping it down to none is our job.