Setting up
Four things, once. After that a month is an import and two clicks.
The order below is the real order of dependencies rather than a tidied-up version of it. Doing it out of order is not merely inefficient: importing deals before the people exist parks every one of them, which looks like the product failing rather than like a step taken early.
1. Publish a comp plan
A plan says what the company pays for. Start from a template and edit it, or write your own in the plan language. It validates as you type and will not publish if it does not compile.
A published version is immutable. Changing a plan creates a new version with its own effective date, so a statement from March can always be recalculated exactly as it was approved.
2. Add the people you pay
Each person needs the identifier your CRM exports for them. That is what an imported deal carries to say who closed it, and a payee without one cannot be credited. Every deal naming them parks instead.
If your plan measures attainment, they also need a quota. Quotas are effective-dated, so raising one in July does not retroactively change June.
3. Write a credit rule
A credit rule says who gets credit for a deal. The common case is one line: the deal owner gets 100%. Teams that split deals need more, and crediting covers it.
4. Generate your periods
Twelve months at a time, aligned to your fiscal year. Deals are imported into a period and commission is calculated per period.
Then, every month
Import the deals and calculate. See running a month.