Incentive Compensation

How Should You Track Your Sales Commissions?

Siva Subramanian
6
min read
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You are a passionate sales rep with closing deals being your superpower. You give your all to sell for your organization and attain your quota. 

And then, you check your commissions and find out that they’re not accurate. 

We’re sure that this is a situation you hate being in. But, it’s inevitable if you still rely on spreadsheets to calculate and track commissions. There isn’t going to be an end to this unfortunate happening until you rely on spreadsheets. In fact, there isn’t something more frustrating than inaccurate commissions for sales reps. 

The Downside of Tracking Commissions Manually 

You might have started to use spreadsheets because it’s what is widely used. It’s all well and good initially, but things go haywire soon. 

Errors are unavoidable

No matter how cautious you are while calculating commissions on spreadsheets, errors are sure to creep in. As per a study, 88% of the spreadsheets have errors, which is not a small number. The reason? It’s all because of manual data entry. Other than that, spreadsheets cannot handle complex calculations and tracking errors can get extremely difficult. 

Lack of transparency

It’s unfortunate when reps have zero visibility to commissions till the time they are paid. They don’t have an idea of what their commissions would look like all throughout, and the errors in the calculations can also be brushed aside. In the end, the commissions aren’t going to be the same as what the reps would expect, which leads to disputes with the ops team. It also demotivates the reps who put their heart and soul into closing deals. 

Eats up your time

A major part of your time is going to be spent in calculating, verifying, and confirming the commissions for your reps. The commission calculation isn’t going to be the same for every team. They can vary depending on the chosen components, and having a track of all those while manually calculating commissions is going to cost you an insane amount of time. 

No scope to integrate

You’d have to manually enter the CRM data, and data from other accounting systems into the spreadsheet to calculate commissions. And you know what the results will be: a huge chunk of your time will be wasted & you cannot escape errors in your calculations. We’re convinced that you don’t want to be in one such situation. 

Impossible to scale

Calculating commissions through spreadsheets can work well when your team is small. But we’re sure that it isn’t going to be that way. As your business grows, and as you add new members to your teams, it’s going to be incredibly tough to calculate commissions manually.  

How Commission Tracking Software Can Help You?

Now that you would’ve known why spreadsheets aren’t the right choice for commission calculation, let’s see how commission tracking software can make things easy for you. 

No more time wasted on commission calculations 

With commission software in place, the calculating commission is not going to be an anxious & time-consuming affair that gives you sleepless nights. No matter the number of components included in commissions, and the size of your team, the commission software can keep commissions up to date, and can seamlessly integrate with other accounting tools as well. 

Provides Real-Time visibility 

Your reps don’t have to shadow account their own commissions and spend their valuable time on tasks other than closing deals. Commissions are calculated in real-time and give your reps a clear picture of their payout details. Also, your reps can forecast commissions and get to know what their payout will look like on closing a particular deal. They’d also know what they’ve to do to attain their quota and exceed it. What's more, managers will also have a detailed view of their teams and can easily track the performance of each member.

Acts as a single source of truth

Your commissions software can be the single source of truth, where everyone in the team can access the same set of data at any point in time. When you’ve to do quarterly business reviews, annual meetings, or performance appraisals, you’d have all the vital information that will help you in making crucial decisions. 

Collaborating with teams become easy

When a pay dispute raises, you can immediately address it on the platform itself so that you don’t have to waste time back and forth. Your reps no more have to carry these disputes on the back of their mind and can primarily focus on selling. The software also maintains the complete history of exceptions made in the plan, and you can spot the discrepancies in no time. 

Final Thoughts

A sales commission software pays off big time, by streamlining your commission process and eliminating the recurring busy work. It not only saves your time and money, but also improves the overall productivity of your teams, and helps reps level up their performance. Book a demo with us now to know how Everstage can be your go-to commission software.

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