Seastar Publications, Inc., is publishing company headquartered in Santa Barbara, California. It publishes Coastal Woman, a quarterly regional magazine, and its sales staff sells advertising for the publication.

Seastar Publications, a small company in its fourth year of business, was paying commissions to its sales staff using Excel spreadsheets to calculate the amounts. First, commissions were being paid whether or not the invoice had been paid by the advertisers. This compromised the company’s cash flow. Second, the commissions were calculated after sales were completed for each magazine, and payments of commissions were paid to the sales reps following publication of each issue. This means the reward of commission to each sales rep was up to three months after the sale was made.

The president of the company, Barbara Lanz-Mateo, approached QCommission to help with several things: to design a commission plan that rewarded sales staff with more immediate commissions and that simultaneously eased cash flow. She envisioned paying half of the commission upon the sale and the other half when the invoice was paid. This would help with cash flow and offer more immediate payment of commission to the sales reps. The problem for the company using these proposed changes was the complexity of figuring the commissions using Excel, the potential for errors, and the number of hours it would take to use this manual process.

The decision was made to use QCommission to automate the process to not only save time but to also provide a more professional and accurate accounting procedure for employee commission payouts. With the already existing sales data within Quickbooks Pro, the process of converting to the QCommission system was relatively painless.

The magazine easily converted the existing commission program into the QCommission software to map each payout transaction to the appropriate sales person with needed accuracy. The software is rather pedestrian looking, but it has proven to be a reliable tool.

QCommission was ready for use within a few weeks with minimal effort by the publishing company. The support staff at Cellarstone was friendly, helpful and always available for addition questions and training.

Seastar Publications would recommend Cellarstone to any prospective client in need of a commission payout solution.

Barbara Lanz-Mateo
President - Seastar Publications, Inc.