External Caps: Counting Work Assigned Outside Distributely

A member cap counts assignments Distributely made. That is the whole picture only if Distributely is the only thing assigning records. Take a rep with a weekly cap of 20. Distributely routes 18 to her. Meanwhile she picks up 15 deals by hand from an unassigned queue in HubSpot. The cap sees 18 and room for 2 more. Her real workload is 33.

An external cap closes that gap. It counts records the rep already owns in HubSpot — no matter how they got there — and folds that number into an existing member cap.

At routing time, Distributely takes the internal count (what it assigned this period via Distributely) and adds the external count (what the rep owns in HubSpot per this configuration). The total is what gets compared to the Cap Limit. Above, 18 plus 15 is 33, over the limit of 20, so the rep is skipped.

External caps live on the External Caps screen. You can also create one directly from a member cap using Add External on the Member Caps screen, which pre-fills the member and scope.

Name and Description — your own labels.

Member (Owner), Scope, and Team — who this counts for, and whether it is scoped globally or to one team. These must line up with the cap you link to.

Linked member cap — required. This is the cap whose limit the external count feeds into. An external cap with nothing linked does nothing. The dropdown only offers caps matching the member and scope above.

Object type — what to count: contacts, companies, deals, tickets, or leads.

Owner property name — the field on those records holding the owner. Usually the standard HubSpot owner field; pick a custom one if that is where ownership lives for you.

Source mode — All owned records.

Period mode — Match member cap periods counts against the same windows the linked cap uses. No period (criteria only) produces one count not tied to a period, added to the cap in every period.

Conditions — narrow what gets counted. Each is a property, an operator, and a value, joined with and or or. Without conditions you count every record of that type the rep owns, which for contacts is far too many.

Leave Active checked to enforce it.

Sync frequency offers 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, or Real time.

Real time checks HubSpot at the moment of each routing decision. The count is always current. The cost is a lookup on every routing decision this cap touches, which adds time to each one.

Scheduled counts on the interval you pick and stores the result, so there is no delay at decision time. The cost is staleness: the count can be up to one full sync interval out of date. On a 60-minute sync, a rep who grabbed eight deals ten minutes ago still looks like she has none.

The linked cap's periods are computed in the member's own timezone, and that is the window the total is compared against.