Brokerage Team Ops — Commission Tracking and Payroll for Indian Realty

Commission attribution — the source of every dispute

Real-estate commission is a multi-actor calculation. A typical booking involves the sourcing salesperson, the closing salesperson, the team lead who oversaw it, the channel partner who referred the lead, and the brokerage itself. When all five expectations are written down at first-touch, the booking pays out cleanly. When any one is informal, the booking produces a dispute that takes the office manager two days to resolve. Brokerages that connect commission to the CRM lead record from day zero have one source of truth; brokerages that calculate on a spreadsheet at month-end have one source of conflict.

Split rules that survive a real booking

The split rule that handles real bookings carries six clauses: who sourced the lead, who closed it, what the channel-partner share is (if any), what the team-lead override is, what the brokerage retains, and what happens if the lead is passed mid-pipeline. The clause that brokerages most often skip — the mid-pipeline handover rule — is the single largest source of disputes. The rule that has worked: the original sourcing share is locked at first qualified meeting; any handover after that pays the original sourcer a fixed 25% of their original share regardless of who eventually closes.

1. Sourcing share — locked at first qualified meeting timestamp
2. Closing share — credited at booking confirmation, not at site-visit
3. Channel-partner share — set at lead capture, never renegotiated post-close
4. Team-lead override — fixed percentage of net brokerage revenue per deal
5. Handover clause — 25% of original sourcer's share if passed post-qualification
6. Cancellation clawback — partial reversal if booking cancels within 30 days

PF and ESI applicability for sales staff

Brokerages often treat salespeople as commission-only contractors to avoid Provident Fund and Employee State Insurance liability. The Employees' Provident Funds Act and the ESI Act do not respect that label — they look at the substance of the relationship. A salesperson with a fixed desk, a fixed reporting structure, and a substantial fixed component (typically over ₹15,000 per month for PF, under ₹21,000 per month gross for ESI) is an employee regardless of the offer-letter language. PF threshold is the basic wage of ₹15,000 for mandatory coverage. ESI applies to gross wages up to ₹21,000 in establishments with ten or more employees in most states. Treating ten desk-based salespeople as contractors creates a compliance exposure that surfaces during inspection.

Shop & Establishment Act registration

Every state's Shop & Establishment Act applies to brokerage offices. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Delhi have the most active enforcement. The Act mandates registration within thirty days of establishment, prescribed weekly working hours, leave entitlements, and a register of employees that an inspector can demand at any time. Your team-ops system should produce the inspector-ready register on demand — name, designation, joining date, weekly off, leave balance, and last salary credited. Brokerages that maintain this digitally treat inspection as a routine event; brokerages that scramble for paper records treat it as a crisis.

Monthly close — what the owner should see on the 5th

By the fifth of every month, the brokerage owner should see one dashboard with four numbers: total commission owed this cycle (split by salesperson, with backup detail one click away), total statutory liability for the previous month (PF, ESI, Professional Tax, TDS), total cash position after these two outflows, and the count of disputed commissions still open. The owner who sees these four numbers on the fifth makes confident decisions about hiring, scheme launches, and pipeline pressure. The owner who waits till the twentieth makes anxious decisions about all three.