When it comes time to payout your team members on a monthly or quarterly basis, you’ll likely want to ensure a few key items are in alignment before completing your payouts.
Here’s a quick guide to validating commissions before completing payouts:
Perform a data completeness check
You’ll want to verify that the information between your CRM and QuotaPath is displaying as expected.
Think of this as a quick confirmation step to verify the total number of opportunities and closed won dollars display as anticipated. We recommend using QuotaPath’s “Deal Page” to review your deals plan-by-plan or team-by-team.
This is a good way to ensure that all the nuances of your business (how managers are paid or multiple people paid on a deal) are accounted for and in alignment with your CRM.
Take a look at the Effective Rate per rep and deal
There are two ways to validate that all your deals are being paid at the correct effective rate. The size of your team, your deal volume, and your preference for the QuotaPath app or excel will help you determine how to best view and validate.
If you have a smaller number of reps or lower deal volume, you can go to the earnings screen and view each rep, one at a time. You can see all of the reps deals for a designated time period and click on a deal to see how an effective rate was calculated to investigate outliers. The deal will show each path (i.e. spiff, accelerator, etc) that contributed to the overall effective rate.
If you have a larger team or high deal volume, you may want to consider exporting your deal data.
To do this, first confirm from the payouts screen that no deals are unresolved. You can then click to the resolved screen and choose “Export CSV.”
We recommend this format because you get all the details of the deal and can further filter and sort as desired in Excel or Google Sheets.
Some QuotaPath users even export all payouts, earnings, deals and Ledger info into one spreadsheet to compare tab to tab.
Pro Tip
When navigating between the “Earned” and “Resolved” sections of the Payouts screen, keep this in mind as you validate the data for paying your monthly or quarterly transactions:
The “Earned” tab time filter is based on the “Deal” date. So, you’ll want to set the filter to the time period the deal was closed, likely last month or quarter.
The “Resolved” tab time filter is based on the “Payout” date. Here, you’ll want to set the filter to the time period you will payout the earnings, likely the current month or quarter.
Reconciling commissions payments using Ledger
With the introduction of ASC606, you should now be reconciling payouts using Ledger as part of your monthly or quarterly accounting close process. This expense recognition activity can be decoupled from the payouts process and should be managed by your finance or accounting team.
With Ledger, QuotaPath helps you track your commission expense and keeps you ASC606 compliant by:
Collecting all the earnings data you need to capitalize or recognize commision expense
Creating amortization schedules to support related journal entries
Generating period summary reports to easily track and reconcile capitalized vs. amortized expense
Pro Tip
Think about the types of products and services you sell and consider making those separate paths in your plan design. Why? ASC 606 rules may require different amortization periods for different products or services. Setting paths for each product will allow you to leverage path filtering more effectively within Ledger to bulk recognize and amortize commission expense.
For example, you may have a simple comp plan that pays out a flat 10% rate on sales of all product types. Instead of creating a single path that applies this flat rate to all sales, you could consider creating multiple paths (one for each product type).