A telecom and IT services brokerage was running catalog, orders, and multi party commissions across a generic CRM and a sprawl of Excel. We rebuilt it as a single operational platform with the commission engine at its core.
3 disconnected systems
Manual month end
Cash leakage on commissions
No audit trailBefore
After
A generic CRM with no concept of reseller margins or multi party commissions, plus Excel for the commission math, the price book, and order financials, all reconciled by hand. As reps and deals grew, month end became both a bottleneck and a liability.
Three pain points
Commission accuracy
Multi role payouts and clawbacks by hand bred disputes and overpayments
No source of truth
Unit cost versus bill price versus margin lived nowhere reliable
No audit trail
Nobody could say who changed a payout or an order
Did you know?
56% of companies encounter commission errors on a regular basis, and over half of enterprise companies admit to commission disputes every single quarter.
According to Gartner, over 70% of companies still use spreadsheets to manage sales commissions. They're structurally wrong for it. Excel is single user and has no native way to connect to CRM, ERP, or payroll, which makes the process slow, error prone, and non real time. At scale, some organizations take months to calculate commissions.
We modelled commissions as first class entities with their own lifecycle, decoupled from orders. That one decision let a single sale spawn multiple commission records for multiple recipients, each tracked, paid, or clawed back independently, without ever corrupting the underlying order.
Commissions as first class entities, decoupled from orders, each carrying its own deal lifecycle. That single call absorbed every complication that surfaced later instead of breaking under it.
“Rep earns a percentage” turned multi dimensional. Two CSEs sharing a deal, a Sales Manager earning an override, and the sale type (initial, upgrade, renewal) changing the math. The honest story is that it wasn't fully knowable upfront. The rules driven engine is what absorbed the churn.
Payment pending becomes Paid
Awaiting activation
Chargeback pending becomes Completed
Commission denied
The fear was simple. “The new system pays people the wrong amount and we have a revolt.” We ran the engine in parallel against a real historical month and showed it reproduced, and in places corrected, the spreadsheet's payouts line by line, with the audit trail behind every number.
SSN and payment data turned this into the SOC 2 conversation. Field level PII encryption, strict role based access, and audit logging, which is the Activity Log on every order, commission, and employee record.
Deferred deeper accounting and ERP integrations and fancier reporting. Get the money, math and data protection right before adding surface area.
The commission math is combinatorial. We built a test matrix against hand calculated payouts, including every clawback path, and treated each workflow status transition as independently verifiable.
Run an order from creation through renewal in one system with live margin and savings. Auto generate and track every commission across the role hierarchy with chargeback handling instead of recalculating in Excel. Onboard a rep via invite flow with the right permissions. And answer “who changed this and when” on any record.
5 to 6 months, phased. Core lifecycle and commission engine first, dashboard and refinements second. The timeline bought correctness, not just screens.
Commission disputes at the first month end dropped versus the spreadsheet era, and reps began self serving their status from the dashboard instead of emailing finance. Post launch, requests clustered around reporting and forecasting. People asking for more analytics means they trust the data, which is the whole game.
A high end household and estate staffing agency was running its pipeline across spreadsheets, email, and WhatsApp. We replaced it with a two sided, stage gated platform where each side sees only the view it needs.
