Sales commission programs are possibly the most variable programs conducted by a firm. These programs tend to vary significantly from industry to industry, and many times within companies in an industry. Sales commission programs tend to be different by employees even within a single firm. Because of the highly variable nature of commission calculations, solutions attempting to solve the problem have to be highly sophisticated. At the same time, they should not burden the user with additional complexity in their operations. One key area of complexity is allowing data interchange between the customer's existing accounting systems and the commissions system. A commission system that can understand the structure of the accounting system data and seamlessly bring in the appropriate data necessary for calculating commissions can be a huge benefit in reducing the inherent complexity in that process.
QCommission is a powerful, flexible sales commission software tool. It calculates sales people’s compensation, accurately, quickly and professionally. QCommission is designed to integrate with QuickBooks®, Salesforce.com, Sage Intact, MS Dynamics GP, MS Dynamics AX, Sugar CRM, Xero, PDF files and many others. QCommission can also operate stand-alone.
ConnectWise Manage® is a business process automation platform that allows your business to sell, service and support technology more efficiently and in a more streamlined way. The business management tool allows your business to centralize all information, automate business process, real-time visibility in operations, and provide better customer support.
Technology
The ConnectWise Manage® API is a RESTful web service and uses a protocol to authenticate 3rd party applications. The Accounting API exposes accounting and related functions of the main ConnectWise Manage® application and can be used for a variety of purposes such as creating transactions like invoices and credit notes, right through to extracting accounting data via our report’s endpoint. The API REST ensures that
- The third-party software complies with security access to the data
- Provides strong error recovery and data logging to make sure data is protected
- Provides standardization across various upgrades of ConnectWise Manage®.
QCommission is a powerful, online, flexible sales commission software. QCommission has tight integration with many accounting/CRM systems to bring in sales details and can also
work as a stand-alone product in providing solutions. It can also share the data with spreadsheets, delimited and fixed length files. Ability to import/export data between ConnectWise Manage® and other data sources, CRM and Accounting software. Able to extract customers, opportunities from other data sources and create Service Tickets, Invoices through integration. Supporting various objects in ConnectWise Manage® such as Accounting, Purchase module and other modules Ability to see the logs, errors occurred during integration and other details in the application. The integration is easily configurable through QCommission profiles, and it can be scheduled to run daily. QCommission is supporting 35+ kind of data sources to do the integration.
Importing Data
Invoices
Commissions are primarily calculated on Revenue. Revenues are mostly based on invoices entered into the accounting system. The various attributes of invoices can be used in the calculation of commissions. In many situations, sales reps are directly associated with invoices. This can be used in properly crediting the invoice to the sales rep prior to calculating commissions. Other data attributes useful in commission calculations include Quantity, Amount, Customer, Product, etc.
Invoices normally go through two events: Invoiced and Paid. Some customers pay commissions on invoiced and some when invoices are paid. Some pay on both events. QCommission can understand the status of the invoices and bring in only the invoices of the right status to process. If invoices change status in ConnecConnectWise Manage® Wise later, it can update the status in QCommission and properly calculate and pay the right commission.
Occasionally commissions are paid out on partially paid invoices as revenue is collected. In this case, it is not enough to just check the paid stamp on the invoice. The payment history transactions will also have to be imported and commissions released as payment is received. In this case both sets of transactions will have to be handled.
Purchase Order
A specific invoice can be set up to connect to one or more purchase orders, so a good match can be easily found. When matching an invoice and a purchase order, a line level match can be made using item code and quantity. Invoice can be matched to purchase orders or bills using customer or customer job.
The ConnectWise Manage® Purchase Order feature is the hub for all your purchasing information and open orders. Because everything inside ConnectWise Manage® easily syncs, purchase orders can be used to track back to the records originally created and store the tracking information of the products ordered. Tracking purchase orders helps you minimize fulfillment costs, while also ferreting out any hidden costs within your Procurement and Inventory process. When it comes to sales, it stays on top of sales opportunities, and have full visibility into the pipeline with automated follow-ups so you never miss the next step, or let a deal get cold.
Exporting Data
You can export the payout data into your system by selecting Export Payout option from the Action Menu. The export process uses a file (text file or excel file) to export the summary or detailed payout information into your company's payroll system.
Complex Commissions
There are many special commissions needs that QCommission has to handle in importing data through ConnectWise Manage® REST API. Here are some of the requirements being handled:
Non-commissionable transactions
Some product and service lines may also need to be excluded from commission calculations. For example, sample items being provided as part of sales may not be commissionable. Commission calculations can also be set to only calculate for certain item groups, even if all data are imported.
Some customer sales may not be considered for commissions. These may be in-house accounts, for example. Commission plans can be set to calculate commissions for only specific customers and customer groups.
Commission Splits
In many commission calculations, a sale must be credited to more than one rep. It is normally split between two reps but could go up to 5-way or higher splits. This could be because two sales reps work in a territory or if an item is sold in one territory and shipped to a different territory. In addition, the splits could be equal or unequal such as 60/40.
With QCommission you can specify any number of splits. The splits can also have an associated split percentage to handle unequal splits. Split percentages can add up to more than 100% if necessary.
Splits can be associated by invoice or invoice lines. Splits can also apply to transactions other than invoices such as expenses. Splits can be associated with customers, products or policies and be used against all associated transactions.
As part of our consulting we will advise on how to configure reps and split percent in ConnectWise Manage® directly, if necessary, or in QCommission.
Profit based Commissions
Many companies calculate commissions based on profit rather than revenue. If products and services are bought and resold, this type of commission makes a lot of sense. Profit commission provides more control over the deal size, where sales people are allowed to discount the sale price.
To calculate commissions on profit, the cost needs to be known in addition to the revenue. There are numerous ways of specifying a cost for a sale:
- Cost can be a fixed average number. For example, consulting companies may decide on an average hourly cost for all their consultants being in different places.
- Cost can be a specific number per product or service. Manufacturing firms may calculate a specific cost per product and assign it to the product, since it may be difficult to know the exact cost of manufacturing.
With the sophisticated ability to calculate profit, QCommission can handle almost any kind of profit-based commissions.
Discount based Commissions
Companies allow their sales people to discount prices on occasion. To make sure that there is not excessive discounting and margins are maintained, they may use the commission plan. Based on how much the product is discounted from the list price, the commission rate may be reduced. This can be done as discount tiers: 0% to 10% discount, 11% to 20% discount, etc.
To calculate discounts, we need to get Product list price, price on the invoice and unit cost from ConnectWise Manage®. Then the discount rate must be calculated and compared to the various tiers to determine commission rates. QCommission can handle these types of calculations.
Others
Sometimes commission rates can change based on AR Aging. If the number of days it takes to get paid for an invoice increases, commission rates could be reduced. QCommission can understand these differences and pay at different rates.
Conclusion
QCommission does a tremendous job understanding the intricacies of the ConnectWise Manage® data structure as well as the complications inherent in the commission process. With this ability, it integrates the two systems in such a manner that the complexity to the customer is reduced to a minimal level. Because of the complexities and the number of different ways customers can use ConnectWise Manage®, our expert services are utilized to configure the exact integration process between QCommission and ConnectWise Manage® for the best solution.
