Flat structure

Flat is a collaborator group structure with no internal ordering or hierarchy. Members live as a plain list, and every member is treated as an equal peer.

How it works

A flat group is exactly what it sounds like: a bag of collaborators with no upline, no downline, and no layers. There is no chain to walk and no tree to traverse, so cascades have nothing to spread across, and credit for an engagement stays with the collaborator who earned it.

Binding a flat group still does a job, and it is the main reason to use one: it controls who is eligible to earn. A collaborator who is a member of the bound group becomes eligible for that program or distributor, so a flat group acts as an allow-list. This eligibility is added to Siren’s direct binding rather than replacing it, so a collaborator qualifies either by being in the bound group or through a direct binding, and neither path masks the other. If the bound group is the only path you use, only its members can earn.

This shapes what the calc picker shows you. On the Programs Edit and Distributors Edit screens, Siren reads the bound group’s structure and filters calc options to ones that match its capabilities. Flat groups don’t advertise hasLayer, so cascade calcs are hidden. You’ll see Fixed and any other layer-agnostic calc, and that’s it.

What flat changes is not who is eligible, since the bound group still decides that, but which calculations are available. With no layers to walk, only single-collaborator calculations like Fixed remain, so credit lands on the one collaborator who fired the engagement rather than spreading up or down a chain. The membership check that decides whether a triggering collaborator belongs to the group runs the same way it does for any other structure.

When to use it

Flat is where most programs begin, because it makes no assumptions about who reports to whom or who sits above whom in an org chart. When you only need to gather collaborators into one group and credit each one for their own work, flat covers it without any extra setup. That fits a sales team where everyone earns the same commission structure regardless of seniority, a reseller pool whose members all work the same deal, a curated marketplace or invite-only roster where only the vetted members on the list can earn, and an affiliate network without referral chains where every affiliate earns on their own engagements and nothing else. Starting flat also keeps your options open, since you can switch the group to a linear chain or parent-child structure later and its members carry over. The per-member metadata that orders those members does not, so after the switch you need to set each member’s position (linear chain) or parent (parent-child) before a cascade reads the group the way you expect.

If you find yourself wishing a single sale could pay out across multiple collaborators based on their position in an org, that’s the signal to look at linear chain or parent-child instead. See Choosing a collaborator group structure for the full comparison.

Configuration

None. Flat is the default structure for a collaborator group. Create a group, pick “Flat” as the structure, add members, and you’re done. There are no per-member position fields, no parent references, no per-layer args to set.

Member ordering in the admin UI is alphabetical for readability and has no effect on behavior. Adding, removing, suspending, or deleting members works the same as any other group: it changes who’s in the bag, and that’s all.