Stardex gives recruiting firms a system for tracking fees, retainer schedules, placements, and team commissions. Whether you run contingent, retained, or a mix of both, the system adapts to how your firm works without requiring any upfront configuration.

This guide covers two core areas:

1. Job-level fee management — retainers, placements, and commission splits on each search
2. Firm-wide fee tracking — a centralized report to monitor billing across all your searches

Key concepts

Fee events

Every billing item in Stardex is a fee event. There are two types:

• Retainer / Milestone — scheduled payments tied to a retainer agreement (e.g., three equal installments)
• Placement — the fee earned when a candidate is placed

All fee events live in one place and share a common set of statuses: Pending, Invoiced, Paid, and Cancelled. You can rename these or add custom statuses in Settings.

Fee statuses

Each fee event has a payment status that drives your revenue calculations:

You can customize status names and colors in Settings > Pipeline & Stages > Fee Statuses ( https://stardex.com/settings?tab=organization) . The four system statuses can be renamed but not deleted. You can add more for tracking.

Firm commission

When logging a placement, you can set a firm commission percentage — the portion of the fee that the firm keeps before splitting the remainder among team members.