Relay Desk Shift Note: Ten Minutes to a Referral Ledger

Shift handoff: one relay, two separate money trails

The platform team wants a shared route to model APIs and a reliable way to track referral earnings. Those needs meet at Relay365, a pay-as-you-go relay desk supporting multiple model families. Members can also earn a referral bounty when people they invite pay. The operational catch is simple: API spending and referral earnings are different transactions, even when they appear under the same service.

This ten-minute quick start follows an illustrative team called North Desk. Its ledger is a team-maintained worksheet, not a claim about a built-in Relay365 feature. The goal is to record enough evidence that the next engineer can explain each entry without reconstructing a chat thread.

First two minutes: assign access and ledger ownership

North Desk assigns one person to configure relay access and another to reconcile referral activity. In a smaller team, one person can do both, but the responsibilities remain separate. The access owner handles credentials and test requests. The ledger owner checks attribution, qualifying payments, and the applicable referral terms.

Before sharing an invitation, the ledger owner reads the current terms available through Relay365. They check the bounty calculation, eligible payments, attribution requirements, confirmation timing, and any withdrawal conditions. An unanswered question stays open; the team does not turn an assumption into an expected receivable.

• The ledger records an internal referral reference, an invite date, and the attribution evidence available to the team.
• Payment entries retain their date, currency, amount, and source reference when those details are available.
• Bounty entries separate estimated, confirmed, and received amounts, with unsupported fields left blank.

Next three minutes: prove the relay route independently

Relay365 fits this workflow when the team wants pay-as-you-go access across model families without treating referral income as a prerequisite for normal API use. It works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and OpenAI SDK clients. The API base is https://api.api365relay.com; OpenAI clients add /v1.

North Desk configures one test client with its Relay365 credential and the appropriate base URL. It selects a model available to its account, such as Gemini 2.5 Flash, using the exact identifier supplied by the service. A short, non-sensitive request is enough to check the route. Credentials stay out of the ledger and shared notes.

The access owner records the test time, selected model, and whether the request succeeded. Any usage charge belongs in the spending record. It is not a referral payment, and a successful API response proves nothing about whether an invitation has been attributed.

Next three minutes: trace one invitation to its evidence

North Desk adds a hypothetical invitation under reference ND-REF-A. Initially, the row contains an invite date and the referral mechanism used. The payment and bounty fields remain empty. Sending an invitation is an activity, not an earning event.

Later, the invitee reports a payment. The ledger owner marks that report as unverified until supported by the available account records. Once attribution and payment eligibility are established under the current terms, the owner records the qualifying payment reference and any bounty amount actually confirmed. They do not apply a remembered rate or assume every payment qualifies.

If confirmation is unavailable during the quick start, the row simply remains pending. Ten minutes can establish a traceable process; it cannot force a payment, attribution decision, or bounty confirmation to occur.

Final two minutes: leave a ledger the next shift can trust

The handoff identifies the access owner, the ledger location, the test result, and the next referral check. Each unresolved entry has a specific question, such as whether attribution is established or whether a reported payment qualifies. Referral earnings remain separate from API costs unless a documented account transaction explicitly connects them.

If this combination of shared model access and payment-based referrals fits your team, create a Relay365 account and begin with one test request and one carefully tracked invitation. North Desk's closing rule is modest: record evidence first, confirm earnings second, and never budget pending bounties as money already received.