Earnings & Commissions

Everything a person is owed exists as an earning — a dated line tied to the sale or session that produced it. Commission on services, products, and jewelry, tips, sliding-scale bonuses, and forfeited-deposit shares all post automatically; the only hand-entered lines are deductions and adjustments.

Earnings write themselves the moment money settles: when a sale completes, or when a session with no sale ends. An open session earns nothing yet — the timer is still deciding the price — so payroll flags sessions still running with commission pending before a period closes.

Whose rate applies

Commission resolves from the most specific rule to the most general — the first level with a rule set wins outright:

1. The rate on the exact skill — this person, this service
2. The rate on the service’s category skill
3. The person’s per-studio default
4. The person’s personal default

A rule at a specific level replaces the general one entirely, and clearing it puts the next level back in charge — a cleared skill rate inherits the category or default rate again. Clearing is not the same as zero: a deliberate 0% is a rule that stops the cascade — “no commission on this service” — where a cleared rate is a gap the next level fills. A person with skills but no default at all pays 0% on any skill without its own rate.

Jewelry commission is its own per-person rate — per-studio overridable, and deliberately never derived from the person’s product rate: leave it blank and jewelry pays no commission at all.

Rate forms

• Percent of subtotal — a percentage of the line’s subtotal.
• Flat amount per unit — a fixed dollar figure times quantity. When the service tiers its price down at volume (piercing bundles), the flat rate can scale down with the tier — and must, when the rate is higher than the discounted per-unit price.

What the percent applies to

The commission basis is the line’s subtotal, and discounts and surcharges each decide which side of the split they touch:

• Discounts — a discount picked at the register comes out of the basis, so both sides share it. A checkout rule chooses explicitly who absorbs its discount: commission on the discounted total, or on the pre-discount price with the discount entirely the studio’s. Rules that name specific artists start out shared; studio-wide rules start out absorbed by the studio.
• Surcharges stay out of the basis — the fee is the studio’s — unless a rule chooses otherwise: a line surcharge can count into the commission basis so the artist earns on the upcharge, and a card surcharge can route its fee to the artists the rule names, split equally.

Each sale freezes these choices as it happens — editing a rule later never rewrites a completed sale’s payroll.

Two things never move the basis: cash and payment-method discounts (the customer’s bill drops; the artist’s commission doesn’t), and tips, which post as their own earning lines — inside the earned total, broken out separately, never taxed.

Sliding-scale commission

A skill’s rate can climb with volume: a base rate plus brackets — “50% up to $2,000, 55% past it” — measured against that person’s qualifying line totals within the pay period, after discounts and surcharges and net of refunds. Two modes decide what crossing a threshold means:

• Milestone reward (retroactive) — hitting the threshold bumps every qualifying line in the period to the higher rate.
• Earn-as-you-go (forward-only) — each line keeps the rate that was active when it happened; the higher rate applies from the crossing onward.

Bonuses post as their own lines under the commission that produced them, each recording the tier that paid it. When the period closes, the brackets settle at the period’s final volume and freeze — later edits never rewrite them, and the next period starts the climb from zero.

The base rate must be above 0% and bracket rates above the base. Brackets are set per skill, and each skill’s ladder tracks its own volume — an artist with brackets on two skills climbs two separate ladders, and work on one never counts toward the other’s threshold. Per-studio overrides carry flat rates only.

One-off overrides

A single session or sale line can pay a flat commission instead of the person’s usual rule — a comp, a guest spot, an apology. The override caps at the line’s subtotal, holds until cleared, and on a session takes an optional reason for the record. It’s a separate permission (Compensation → Override) from running payroll, so the front desk can be trusted with it (or not) independently.

When earnings lock

Once a session’s commission is inside a closed period — or has actually been paid out — the session’s money facts lock: price, artist, cancellation, deletion all refuse. The books that produced a paid number stay as they were; fixes go forward into the open period as an adjustment or correction.

Refunds handle themselves. Refunding work claws the commission (and the tip’s share) back as negative lines — dated now, so if the artist was already paid, the clawback lands in the current period as a balance their future earnings absorb. A frozen stub is never edited: even a sale force-deleted after settlement leaves its paid line standing — reattached to the session behind it, or marked as coming from a deleted sale when there isn’t one.