What a commission tracker needs to do

Most commission trackers only store the answer

A tracker, whether it is a tab in a workbook or a tool you pay for, usually holds one row per person per month and a figure at the end of it. That is genuinely useful. It tells you what payroll owes and whether the number moved. It is also the part of the job that was never hard.

The hard part arrives when a rep asks why their number is what it is. At that point the figure in the tracker is not evidence, it is a claim, and the reasoning that produced it lives in formulas that have been edited since, in a CRM export that has been replaced, and in somebody’s memory of what the plan said in March.

What you are actually tracking

A commission figure is the end of a chain, and every link in it can be the thing in dispute:

• The deals that counted. Which ones closed in the period, at what value, and which were later corrected or reversed.
• Who was credited. Credit is a separate question from what a deal pays. Splits, overrides and territory rules all decide it, and they change independently of the rate.
• The rate that applied, and why that rate. An accelerator that kicks in at 100% of quota means the same deal pays differently depending on when in the quarter it landed.
• Everything applied afterwards. Draws recovered, clawbacks, caps, SPIFFs and manual adjustments, each of which moves the total without changing any deal.

A tracker that records only the total has discarded all four. That is fine until the first time it is not.

Four questions that tell you whether yours is enough

• Can you show a rep the deals behind a figure from six months ago, as the figure was when they were shown it?
• If a deal is corrected after a period closed, does the old statement still exist, or was it typed over?
• When a deal is credited to nobody, or credited to somebody whose plan pays nothing on it, does anything tell you before payday?
• Could somebody other than the person who built it run a month, without asking them anything?

If the answers are comfortable, keep what you have. A tracker you trust and can operate is worth more than a product you have to learn. These questions are how you find out whether you are tracking commission or just recording it.

Tracking that keeps the reasoning

AlgoSplit tracks the derivation, not just the total. Every figure on every statement opens up to the deal behind it, the credit split that allocated it, the rate that applied and the band it came from, and the arithmetic that produced the number. The rep sees the same view the finance lead does, which is what takes the argument out of it.

Approved periods are frozen, so a statement somebody was shown in March is still that statement in September, and a late correction becomes an adjustment in a later period rather than an edit to a closed one. Deals nobody was credited for, and deals credited but paid nothing, are reported by name at approval time instead of quietly summing to a total that looks correct.

It is $149 a month for the whole workspace, any number of people tracked, with no setup fee and no annual contract. Setup is a CSV of deals and a plan, not a project.

See it before you decide

The example statement is a real one with a line opened, so you can see exactly what is kept per figure. The plan templates cover thirteen commission structures with worked examples you can check by hand against your own plan.

If you would rather ask a person, send us your plan and how many people you pay on the contact page and we will tell you plainly whether it fits, including when the answer is that what you already have is fine. Or start a workspace free for 30 days and track one real month through it before you pay for anything.