Commission Rules & Splits

A commission rule is where you define, once, who earns what when a deal closes. When a property sale or a lease reaches its winning stage, REDA reads the rule attached to that deal and produces the payout records automatically. This article walks the three-level model REDA uses — the rule, its rule items, and optional splits on an account — and, just as importantly, calls out the two things REDA deliberately does not enforce, because both are silent ways to over- or under-pay. No prior REDA setup experience is assumed; every term is defined as we reach it.

The three-level model

Commissions in REDA are built from three kinds of record, each nested inside the one before it:

When a deal closes, REDA reads the rule attached to the deal's Commission Rule field, walks each item, resolves the recipient, applies any splits on that recipient's account, and writes one Commission record per payout. That last step — the calculation itself — is covered in How Commissions Calculate; this article is about building the rule so the calculation has something to read.

The rule header

The rule header carries just a handful of fields, because all the real logic lives on the items:

Rules are scoped by Region: a regional team sees the rules for its own region, and REDA stamps the region code onto the rule for you — you never type it.

The rule items — who earns what

Each rule item is one payout line. There are four decisions to make on every item: who gets paid, in what role, how much, and when it's due.

Who: static or dynamic recipient

Every item names a recipient in one of two ways, and exactly one of them must be filled in:

• A specific account — you pick the earning account directly (a named brokerage or partner). The same account earns on every deal that uses this rule.
• A field on the deal — instead of a fixed account, you point the item at a field on the deal that holds an account. Whoever is on that field at the moment the deal closes gets the commission. Use this when the earner varies deal by deal, such as the listing agent recorded on each sale.

Leave both blank and REDA won't save the item:

Role, type, and amount

Each item also carries a Role — one of Marketing Team, Executive Team, Opportunity Owner, or Partner — which labels the payout for reporting, and a Commission Type that decides how the amount is figured:

• Fixed — a flat amount you enter in Fixed Commission Amount.
• Percentage — a rate you enter in Commission %, applied to the deal's commission base (the dollar figure, such as the sale price or annual rent, the percentage is calculated against) when the payout is calculated.

The type you choose decides which amount field REDA insists on. Miss it and you'll see one of:

Due date offset and charge code

Two more fields round out the item:

• Due After Days — how many days after the deal's key date the payout falls due. The key date is the lease start date on a lease, or the under-contract date on a sale. (The mechanics of the due-date stamp are covered in How Commissions Calculate.)
• Charge Code — the category used when the payout is treated as a payable. See Charge Codes.

Splits: fanning a payout out across accounts

The four fields on one record. Meridian Properties is the earning account, 60% of its commission goes to Harbour Realty Agent, and Role is carried onto the payout for reporting. Nothing here enforces that a set of splits totals 100% — that is on you.

Sometimes a single earning account really represents several parties — a brokerage that keeps a house share and passes the rest to an agent. Splits handle that. A split lives on the earning account's Commission Splits related list and has four fields:

When a rule item's recipient account has splits, REDA produces one payout per split instead of one to the account — each split account paid its share, with the earning account kept on the payout as its parent. A recipient with no splits simply gets one payout at 100%.

These split records are private, so a colleague may not see the split setup you built on an account even when they can see the rule itself — worth knowing if someone reports that a split "isn't there."

Building a rule, step by step

Worked example: a residential sales rule

The rates, amounts, and splits below are illustrative, picked to show the model; use your own when you build a real rule.

You build a rule Residential Sales — Standard in the Harbour District region and activate it. It has two items:

• Item A — Percentage, 1.5%, recipient = the brokerage account Meridian Properties, role Partner, Due After Days 30. Meridian Properties has splits on its account: House 40% and Agent 60%.
• Item B — Fixed, 5,000.00, recipient = a field on the deal that names the marketing-source account, role Marketing Team.

When a sale to David Okafor closes with a commission base of 1,000,000.00, this rule produces three payouts — the House and Agent shares of Item A, plus the flat Item B. The exact amounts, the due dates, and how the base becomes each payout are walked through in How Commissions Calculate, which shares this same example.

The same three-level model drives leasing commissions too. A simpler rule — one Percentage item paying leasing agent Nadia Khan's account, role Opportunity Owner, with no splits — is all it takes to pay her a commission when she signs tenant Aisha Rahman to a lease. On a lease the payout's key date is the lease start date rather than a sale's under-contract date, and there's no automatic close step, so someone runs the calculation by hand. That leasing walk-through lives in How Commissions Calculate.

A commission rule record, tied to a region and marked active. Its rule items — one paying a named account, one resolving the recipient from a field on the deal — live under the Rule Items tab.

A rule item: the named-account recipient, the role, a percentage commission type, and the Due After Days that sets when each commission comes due.

One of the two commission splits sitting on the Meridian Properties account: the house share at 40%. Its sibling routes the remaining 60% to the agent, so any commission earned under this account is divided between them.

Field reference

Rule item fields:

Commission split fields (on the account):

Where to go next

1. How Commissions Calculate — what happens when a deal closes, and the destructive recalculation you must understand before recalculating.
2. Charge Codes — the category you set on each rule item.
3. How Billing Works in REDA — the mental model behind charges, invoices, and payouts.
4. Settlement Codes — the sibling vocabulary for closing costs on deals.

Frequently asked questions