The money on a deal lives on the deal. A transaction records what your office expects to earn, and once commissions are entered it shows what each person is owed.
Introduction
Somebody asks what an agent is getting on a closed deal, and the answer sits in three places: what was agreed, what was entered, and what the disbursement says.
A transaction keeps all of it. The Sale & Commission section holds what your office writes down while the deal is live: list price, sale price, the total commission you expect, earnest money, financing type, and a Commission Summary box for the terms behind those numbers. None of it calculates anything. It's the file's own record of the deal's money, and every account has it whether or not the Commission Module is on.
Once commissions are entered, the transaction gains a Financial Info section and a Commission Disbursement Authorization, and those carry the figures your office actually pays from. What a given person sees of any of it comes down to their permissions, which is the part worth knowing before you answer a question about a number.
How It Works
A transaction records the deal's money first, the Commission Module calculates it second, and permissions decide who reads which.
What a Transaction Records on Its Own
The Sale & Commission section: list price, sale price, total commission, earnest money amount, financing type, and the Commission Summary box. Total commission is what your office expects to earn on the deal, typed in by hand. The Commission Summary is notes rather than math, so nothing entered in either one moves a figure on a CDA or in a financial report. See Commission Summary Fields.
What Appears Once Commissions Are Entered
A Financial Info section on the transaction, and a CDA filed with the transaction's financial documents. Financial Info is where an agent's net payable is shown, and the [download] link to the right of it produces the transaction's Commission & Fees Statement. A transaction carries one commission record: one Commission Summary and one CDA, whoever is on the deal.
Who Sees Which Figures
Money access and document access are separate permissions, so seeing a transaction and seeing its money are two different grants.
| Who | What they see on the transaction |
|---|---|
| Master admins, and admins with Enter financial data in that Location | Every figure on the deal, both sides, and the CDA |
| An agent on the transaction | Their own part of Financial Info, including their net payable, and their own commission statement |
| Anyone else who can open the transaction | The Sale & Commission fields. Financial Info and the CDA are absent rather than locked |
Agents don't see each other's numbers, and that holds when two of your own agents are on opposite sides of the same deal.
What Each Field Holds, and When It Locks
Most questions about these fields aren't about what to type. They're about why the box has gone grey, and the answer is nearly always that a later step has taken ownership of the number.
| Field | What it holds | Who edits it, and when it locks |
|---|---|---|
| List Price | What the property was listed at. | It shows on the transaction, not as a column on the Transactions list. To read it across deals, download a transaction spreadsheet. |
| Sale Price | What the property sold for, and the basis commission calculates from. | Locked on the Edit Transaction page once commissions are entered, so the transaction and the CDA can't disagree. Change it through the commission entry instead. |
| Total Commission | What your office expects to earn, as a dollar figure typed in by hand. | Admins only, on an existing transaction. It doesn't accept a percentage, and it isn't a gross-commission entry — commission calculates from the sale price. |
| Earnest Money Amount | The deposit held on the deal. | An agent can enter it while creating a transaction, but not afterwards — after that it's admin-only. It locks once a CDA exists. |
| Financing Type | How the buyer is paying. | A fixed list you can't add to, and one type applies at a time. |
Download a Transaction's Commission & Fees Statement
Get the deal's commission and fees on one sheet, once commissions have been entered on it.
Who Can Do This: Master admins, and admins with the "Enter financial data" permission for the transaction's Location. Agents can download their own.
To download a transaction's Commission & Fees Statement:
- Open the transaction and scroll to the Financial Info section.
- Click the [download] link to the right of the section.
- Save or print the statement.
The statement sets out the commission on the deal and the fees taken off it, down to what's payable.
Enter the Numbers the CDA Is Built From
The Sale & Commission fields are a record your office typed. The figures in Financial Info come from one guided form, run once per deal.
Manage Commissions is the one screen where you record a transaction's money, and it's what your CDA and every financial report are built from.
See Manage Commissions Workspace
Record Compensation the Buyer Is Paying
Compensation doesn't always come from the seller now, and which side of the deal you're on decides where you record the amount.
Compensation coming from the buyer rather than the seller has its own field — it just isn't showing until you open it. Here is where it lives, and what to do from the listing side where it doesn't.
See Record Buyer-Paid Compensation
Decide Who Can See the Money
An admin who works every file and a bookkeeper who reads every number are two different grants on the same page, and most offices want one of each.
Document access and money access are two different switches in Pipeline, set on the same page. Once you see them as separate, most of what offices want here turns out to be a checkbox rather than a compromise.