Managing the number
Every commission dispute is the same dispute: show me the arithmetic.
And in most companies the honest answer is that the arithmetic lived in a spreadsheet that has been edited nine times since, by somebody who has left.
So the plan is versioned, the version is pinned to the payment, and the payment uses the number that was previewed rather than recalculating.
Reproducible
The version that paid you is frozen, whatever happened to the plan since.
A plan is written, checked for sense, and published — and publishing freezes a version. Every payment pins the version it was calculated under, so changing the plan next quarter cannot reach backwards.
Which means a question about a payment made eleven months ago ends in an answer rather than an argument.
- Deal
- Smoke & Co — depot rollout · €84,600
- Plan
- EMEA new business · version 3
- Your share
- 60% — split with the solutions lead
- Rate applied
- as version 3 defined it
- Currency
- € → £ at the rate on the close date
- Vested
- when the invoice cleared
- Nothing accrues without a preview first —
A dry run is required, and the amount that gets paid is the amount the dry run produced rather than a fresh calculation at payment time. What you previewed is literally what is paid.
- A failed preview is recorded, not swallowed —
With where in the plan it failed and why — so a broken plan is visible rather than silently producing nothing.
- Split credit redistributes rather than evaporating —
If a plan splits credit across roles and one role has nobody in it, that share is spread proportionally across the roles that did match — and if none matched, it falls back to the deal's owner in full. Most engines simply lose the orphaned share.
- A contractor is not paid twice —
Where attribution reaches somebody paid through supplier invoices rather than payroll, they are skipped here — with the reason recorded. The sort of rule that only gets written after it has cost somebody.
- A clawback is a new entry, never an edit —
The original stays exactly as it was and a reversing entry is written against it, with a required reason. The trail reads forwards.
Getting paid
Two routes, chosen automatically, and neither can pay a stale number.
Somebody with an employee record is paid through payroll; somebody who only exists in the CRM goes to a manual queue with a payment reference required. Trying the wrong route is refused by name rather than half-working.
On the payroll side, approving the run pays exactly the entries the calculation staged — and if anything changed in between, the whole run aborts rather than paying a figure nobody checked.
- The exchange rate is captured once, at the event —
And never revalued. A payment does not move because a rate did.
- The rep sees the plan text behind their own payment —
Along with the source deal, resolved live so a renamed deal shows its current name, and the raw detail underneath.
- Replaying the same event is a no-op —
Each accrual is keyed to what caused it, so a replayed event cannot pay twice.
›Are tiers marginal or cliff?
Cliff. The whole amount takes the rate of the band it lands in — it is not decomposed across bands. Say that plainly to your team when you design a plan, because it changes behaviour at the boundary.
›Is there an annual cap?
A ceiling can be applied per payment. It is not a running total across the year — the calculation has no access to what has already been paid, so three large payments under one "annual cap" each pay in full.
›Does a clawback recover money through payroll?
Not today. The reversing entry is written and the negative does not currently flow into a payslip. Recovery is a manual conversation.
›Are there draws, guarantees or new-hire ramps?
No. Plans compute on events; there is no guaranteed minimum, no recoverable draw and no ramp for somebody in their first quarter.
›Is there a commission statement a rep signs off?
There is a rep-facing view with every accrual, the plan behind it and the source record. There is no formal statement document, no acknowledgement step and no dispute flow.