Why caps exist
Deep plans can pay more than the margin available. Caps are the safety valve. They limit how much a single position can earn per cycle and, at company level, how much of total volume can be paid out.
Position caps
A per-position cap is a maximum bonus amount per cycle, usually tiered by rank. Earnings above the cap are either flushed (lost) or, in some plans, rolled to a second position. Position caps are standard in binary plans and common in matrix and board plans.
Company payout cap
A company-wide cap targets a payout ratio (for example, 45 percent of commissionable volume). If a cycle's computed bonuses exceed the target, all bonuses are scaled down proportionally. This protects margin without changing the plan every month. DIRSL can alert first and only scale if you enable it.
Flush-out
Flush-out expires unpaired carry-forward volume after a number of cycles, or on inactivity. Without it, binary carry-forward accumulates into a liability. A common rule: unpaired volume expires if the position is inactive for a cycle, or after 52 weeks regardless.
Communicating caps
Caps are unpopular if they surprise people. Show the cap, current earnings against it and the next rank's cap on the member dashboard. DIRSL exposes these fields in the portal and in the earnings statement.