Understanding your commission
Most support questions about commission are really questions about provenance: which source produced this number, and is that the source we agreed to use? Heysen answers that explicitly rather than blending sources together.
One number, one source, in priority order
Section titled “One number, one source, in priority order”The commission figure the agent app shows comes from the first of these three layers that has anything to say:
| Order | Layer | commissionSource |
What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Static monthly income results | static |
The agency’s own loaded income results for the agent |
| 2 | Approved carrier / processor results | approved |
Approved commission results for the current year, cash basis |
| 3 | Legacy settlements | settlements |
Net amounts from the legacy settlement records |
If none of the three produces a value, the source is none.
Two things follow from this:
- Layers are not added together. The number you see is one layer’s total, not a sum of the three. If the platform ever summed them, an agent whose agency loaded static results and whose carrier approved results would see roughly double.
- The label travels with the number. The app shows which layer produced it, so “why is my commission different from last month” usually resolves to “the source changed”, which is a much easier conversation than comparing two unlabelled totals.
The dashboard total and the operations summary are produced by the same query. They are guaranteed to be the same number; if they differ, that is a defect, not a rounding artifact.
Approved, payable, and paid are three different things
Section titled “Approved, payable, and paid are three different things”Keep these apart when you read a commission screen:
- An approved result is an earned amount recorded by the source. It is what the priority chain above uses.
- A payment event is a cash movement. A payment-only event says something about money moving, not about whether more commission was earned.
- A bank arrival is a third thing again — the money reaching an account.
Adding an approved result to a payment event double-counts the same commission. The app keeps them in separate sections for that reason.
Within a result, gross and net are different fields, not two renderings of one number: deductions, adjustments, and reversals are recorded separately from the amount earned. A net figure is only meaningful next to the items that produced it, which is why the commission screen shows line items and not just a total.
Why a zero can be correct
Section titled “Why a zero can be correct”A zero is not automatically “the data is broken”. These are all different situations, and the platform distinguishes them:
| Situation | What it means |
|---|---|
| No commission | The policy produced no commission for this agent |
| Not licensed | The agent is not licensed yet, so there is no premium-based income to show |
| Frozen | The processor has frozen the result |
| Deferred payment | The commission exists but its payment is deferred |
| Relationship pending | Who earned the commission is not confirmed yet |
| Data unknown | The source did not supply the field |
“Unknown” is not zero. Where the source supplies no value, the platform must not print 0 — a real zero and a missing value lead to different decisions. If a figure looks like a zero but nothing on the screen says which of the rows above applies, ask before acting on it.
Where the monthly trend comes from
Section titled “Where the monthly trend comes from”The monthly series behind the commission detail comes from the same data as the total. The chart prefers a month’s net amount when the series carries one and falls back to the recorded amount otherwise — which is why a month can appear in the trend without appearing as a settlement line item. Where the series carries a target for a month, the chart plots it alongside.
The trend is a shape, not a statement of when money hit a bank. Use the line items for the “when”, and the trend for the “which months moved”.