Run a Deal Where Nobody Earns Commission

An agent bought it themselves, or the deal pays nothing — and you still want it counted, and you still need the office's fee. Generate the CDA anyway; that's what makes the deal exist to your reports.

Introduction

A transaction with no commissions entered is invisible to every financial report in Pipeline. It isn't listed as a zero. It isn't listed. So a deal that closed for no commission, if you skip commission entry, drops out of your production numbers entirely, and the sale price and the unit go with it.

Generating the CDA at zero fixes that. Sales volume and units are allocated separately from the money, so the deal counts as production even when nobody was paid. And if the office is still owed a fee on it, there's a specific route for that, because the mechanism most people reach for cannot work at zero.

When to Use This

• One of your agents bought or sold their own property and took no commission.
• The brokerage is keeping the entire commission and the agent gets nothing.
• A deal closed for no commission and you still want the sale in your volume numbers.
• You need to collect the office's transaction fee on a $0 deal.
• You tried to apply an Agent Fee and Pipeline wouldn't take it.

Why This Beats Leaving It Blank

Skipping commission entry on a deal worth nothing feels tidy. There's no money to record, so there's nothing to record.

What you lose is the deal itself. Production reports, sales volume, unit counts, comparative production — all of them read transactions that have commissions entered, so a blank one is absent from your year. The agent doesn't get the unit, the office doesn't get the volume, and in January nobody can explain why the numbers are short. Two minutes of entering zeroes keeps the deal in the record where it belongs.

1. Generate the CDA at Zero

Enter commissions as you normally would, with the commission at 0% or $0. Pipeline accepts it — a CDA with no money on it is a perfectly valid document.

The Commission Disbursement Authorization tells your closing agent how the commission should be split — and Pipeline builds it from the numbers you enter on the transaction.

See CDA Generation

2. Allocate the Volume and Units Anyway

In the disbursement step, give the agent the sale price as sales volume and the unit they earned. Those fields don't follow the commission, so they'll take the credit even though the money is zero — and that's what puts the deal into your production reports.

You allocate sales volume and units by hand, and they don't follow the commission dollars. That's what lets a dual-sided deal credit two sides, an assistant credit nobody, and a mentor take money without taking production.

See Give Every Agent the Production Credit They Earned

3. Give the Brokerage Its Share When It Keeps Everything

Different case, same screen. When the office keeps the whole commission and the agent takes none, enter the broker's split as a dollar figure in the first step and set the agent's split to 0% in the disbursement step. Volume and units can still go to the agent.

4. Collect the Office's Fee With a Client Fee

Here's the part that trips people. An Agent Fee is subtracted from an agent's commission — so on a zero-commission deal there's nothing for it to come out of, and Pipeline won't apply it. Deductions have the same problem for the same reason.

Use a client fee instead. On an agent's personal purchase, the agent is the buyer, so a client fee collected from the buyer and paid to the brokerage is both accurate and the only thing that works.

When a buyer or seller pays something on top of the commission, that's a client fee — collected at closing and routed to your brokerage or to the agent.

A buyer or seller owes your office something that isn't commission — a broker fee, a retainer, a reimbursement, a tax. Client Fees is the one mechanism that collects it at closing, and it works even when the commission is zero.

See Collect a Fee From the Buyer or Seller