Overview
Country: United States of America
QCommission supports the QuickBooks® versions from 2002 through 2022 for all the editions of QuickBooks® Pro and QuickBooks® Premier.
(Accountant, Contractor, Manufacturing and Wholesale, NonProfit, Professional Services, Retail)
QCommission supports the QuickBooks® versions from 4.0 through 20.0 for all the editions of QuickBooks® Enterprise.
Country: Canada
QCommission supports the QuickBooks® versions from 2002 through 2022 for all the editions of QuickBooks® Pro and QuickBooks® Premier.
(Accountant, Contractor, Manufacturing and Wholesale, Nonprofit, Professional Services, Retail, Multi-Currency)
Country: UK
QCommission supports the QuickBooks® versions from 2002 through 2022 for all the editions of QuickBooks® Pro and QuickBooks® Accountant.
Technology
CellarStone provides QXchange, a sophisticated integration tool to map QuickBooks® data to QCommission.
Importing Data
Invoices and Payments
Other transactional data that can be imported include Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Estimates and Payments. QCommission can import these transactions and use them in calculations as well.
In addition to transactional data, QCommission can import master data from QuickBooks® such as Customer, Customer Job, Item, Vendor, etc. The data imported can include the hierarchy structure. This becomes very useful in calculating commissions based on these various criteria.
Exporting Data
Sales reps are normally people on the payroll of the company. Many companies use the payroll functionality available within QuickBooks® to issue the paychecks. In addition to base pay, sales commission payments will need to be processed and provided as paychecks to the employees. QCommission can update the payroll information for a specific employee. Sales commission payout information can then be processed as part of the paycheck.
Many times commissions are paid to workers that are not employees of the company. In these cases, commissions are paid out normally as accounts payable checks. QCommission has the ability to take the commission payout information and directly update the bills to be paid within QuickBooks®.
There are many special commission needs that QCommission has to handle in importing/exporting data through QuickBooks® SDK. Here are some of the requirements being handled:
QuickBooks® stores all the financial data for the company including all the revenue. But not all revenue is eligible for commissions. Only the relevant transactions should be used in commission calculations.
In many commission calculations, a sale has to 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 particular 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.
As part of our consulting we will advice on how to configure reps and split percents in QuickBooks® 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.
- Cost can be an average cost from purchasing. As products are acquired for resale, the incoming cost may vary. An average cost can be used for calculation of profits.
- Cost can be a specific cost from purchasing. Resellers many times acquire products for a specific sale, in which case the exact cost is known from the purchase order or from bills paid.
- Cost can be cumulative for a project or job. In many cases, cost is really a cost of the whole project rather than for a single invoice or line.
QuickBooks® does not provide a good method of determining detailed profitability. The Job Profitability report is overly broad and includes items that for a commission purpose should not be treated as costs. Profitability is also not determinable by a sales rep in QuickBooks®. In QuickBooks®, there is no inherent connection between an invoice (revenue) and cost (purchase order or bill) other than through a customer job, and that is too broad.
QCommission can overcome the limitations of QuickBooks® and calculate commissions based on profit. QCommission has sophisticated importing and calculation logic necessary to calculate profit.
- 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.
- Revenue and costs can be cumulated for a customer job across multiple periods and profit calculated continuously.
- Cost can be used directly from the item record, or after other methods of finding cost have been exhausted.
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 QuickBooks®. Then the discount rate has to be calculated and compared to the various tiers to determine commission rates. QCommission can handle these types of calculations.
Other
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 QuickBooks® 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 QuickBooks®, our expert services are utilized to configure the exact integration process between QCommission and QuickBooks® for the best solution.