How to correct a commission statement after it was sent

A real estate commission statement that has already gone out is the record of what the office calculated when the file was paid. The agent may have it on paper, or in the email Pay & archive sent. When a figure on it is wrong, leave that page as it is. Write a second page, a correcting statement, with its own date. Show what the first page said, what it should have said, and the difference. Paying the difference, or collecting it back, is its own date. It is not a rewrite of the day the file was paid.

Keep the statement that already went out

The first statement stays on the file, under Paid & archived, with the payment date it was issued on. Open statement still opens that page. A correction does not replace it, does not change its payment date, and does not send a second copy of that payment email. The agent can put the two pages side by side. If the first page is gone, there is nothing honest to correct against.

The new page is headed as a correcting statement, with the date of the adjustment. Under that it says the adjustment was paid or refunded on that date, and that the original payment stays in history. Each money line has three columns: previous, corrected, and difference. Previous is what was in effect before this correction. Corrected is the figure after it. Difference is corrected minus previous, and it can be zero.

A short example, using round teaching numbers and not anyone's closing: the statement that went out showed $10,000 paid by the office. The corrected figure is $12,000. The correcting statement shows $10,000 as previous, $12,000 as corrected, and $2,000 as the difference. The $10,000 payment stays on its original date. The $2,000 is a later adjustment, on the date the broker-owner records for it.

What you can change, and what stays

On a paid sale, the broker-owner corrects the commission dollars, the deductions taken before the split, the deductions taken from the agent's side after the split, and the admin fee the agent collected. A file with one commission has one commission box. A file with a listing commission and a buyer commission has one box for each. The lines already on the statement are the lines you can change. You are correcting amounts, not building a new statement from a blank page.

The people on the file stay, and so do their shares and the plan the closing was paid on. The sale price stays. The closing date stays. Which side the file covers stays. If the contract price was wrong, what this correction changes is the commission dollars, not the sale price recorded when the file was paid. Changing the plan after the fact is not how a wrong statement gets fixed. The closing keeps the plan it was paid on.

The admin fee the agent collected is its own line, apart from what the office paid. A deduction after the split is its own line too. Those amounts can change without becoming the office's payment, and the difference on each line is shown on its own.

Preview first, then issue

On the paid file, the broker-owner chooses Correct statement. The review is titled Correct a paid statement. It asks for a short reason, the adjustment payment or refund date, and the corrected amounts. The date has to fall on or after the original payment, and it cannot be after today. The note on that review says the difference is recorded as its own payment or refund, and the original payment stays as it was.

Preview correction shows the three columns and writes nothing. The Paid & archived receipt is still the original while the preview is open. If you edit the review after the preview, the confirmation goes away until you preview again. Confirm adjustment and issue is what writes the correcting statement. When it has been issued, the review says the correcting statement was issued and the original payment is unchanged.

A later correction starts from the last corrected amounts, not from the original a second time. Each one is its own page, with its own date and its own difference. The first statement is still the one that was sent.

The difference has its own date

The adjustment date is the date the extra payment or the refund belongs to. On the paid report, a correcting statement is a separate row, marked as an adjustment, and that date sets the year. A correction issued in January for a file paid in December stays a December payment plus a January adjustment. The report does not add another closing for the adjustment, and it does not count the sale price a second time. Gross, what the agent is paid, and the brokerage's revenue still have to reconcile on that row, and a change to deductions after the split is named on it.

Deskwork records the figures. The brokerage pays the agent, or collects a difference back, the way it already pays agents. No money moves because the correcting statement was issued, and bank details do not belong on it.

When the cap would change a later file

Toward cap is its own line, for the cap period the original statement was paid in. A correction that changes that contribution updates the balance for that same period. When that period has already ended, today's balance is left as it is. The cap period's dates are printed on the correcting statement.

If the cap change could reprice a later file that was already paid in that cap year, Deskwork names those files and issues nothing. It does not rewrite the later statements, and it does not guess a new balance. Fixing this file by quietly changing the next one is the failure the refusal is there to stop. The same review refuses a corrected cap balance that would fall outside the range the plan allows.

How a cap is counted across the year, so the remaining balance on the original statement was not a guess, is covered in how to track agent commission caps.

What this correction does not cover

This is for a paid sale whose original statement and payment date are still on the file, and whose figures can be worked again from what was kept. A referral is not corrected here. A file that was never paid is not corrected here. A paid file that came in without a complete statement, or whose original pricing cannot be reproduced exactly, needs a separate review. Deskwork issues no correcting statement in those cases, rather than inventing the missing baseline.

The lines an agent should have been given in the first place, and how that page differs from the form sent to the title company, are in how to write an agent commission statement. The order to check a closing before anything is sent is in how to reconcile commission at closing. Correcting a statement is what you do after that check was wrong, or after a figure changed once the agent already had the page.

Who sees the correcting statement

Only the broker-owner can open Correct statement and confirm the adjustment. An agent sees their own correcting statement, under the statement they open, and not a teammate's figures on a shared file. The heading, the adjustment date, and the three columns are what tell the new page from the first. The original payment email is not sent again.

The dates that led up to the closing, the inspection deadline and the financing deadline among them, are not corrected on this page. The transaction timeline calculator lists those dates from the contract date and the closing date. It is a calendar, not a statement, and nothing typed into it is saved.

Questions brokers ask

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Read next

• How to write an agent commission statement
• How to reconcile commission at closing
• Transaction timeline calculator