Commission plans that actually scale with your brokerage
Splits, caps, tiers, teams, franchise fees, referral fees, broker fees, revenue share — a look at modeling real-world plans without a fragile spreadsheet.
Ask ten brokerages how they pay their agents and you'll get ten answers. Traditional splits. Graduated tiers that change as an agent's production grows. Annual caps after which the agent keeps everything. 100% models with a desk fee. Team structures with two levels of split. Franchise and referral fees off the top. Client-paid broker fees that add to revenue without touching the agent. Revenue share to the person who recruited them.
The problem isn't any one of these — it's that real plans combine them. A spreadsheet can model one structure cleanly and then breaks the moment you layer a cap onto a graduated plan inside a team. The math becomes a maze of hidden cells that only one person understands, and that person is on vacation the week payroll runs.
A composable commission engine treats each of these as a building block. A plan is a base structure plus the components that apply to it: a cap, a set of fees, a team split, an overlay. The engine computes every deal the same way, shows an itemized breakdown for each party, and captures the year-to-date state that tiers and caps depend on. When an agent asks why their check is what it is, the answer is one screen, not a phone call.
The result is that your plans can be as sophisticated as your brokerage needs without becoming fragile. You model the plan once, and every disbursement follows it to the penny.
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