Overview
The calculation of sales commissions is a very complex problem, yet many companies use highly manual processes to do the work. With QCommission the entire process of automating sales commissions can be accomplished. For sales people, nothing is more important than the sales compensation check they get on a regular basis. Sales people work hard to close their sales and expect to get their sales commissions correctly and on a timely basis. They expect the calculations to be accurate based upon the agreed upon sales compensation plans. They need clear and detailed statements that explain the basis of every calculation.
The majority of sales people would agree they do not get a clear and correct sales commission statement. Sales compensation plans are by their nature complex. The data needed to calculate the plans is not always available, the plans change on a regular basis and there are exceptions to the exceptions. Sales people get their sales commissions typically weeks or months after the period is over. Frequently the crediting and calculations are incorrect. As a result, the sales commission statements are not clear and obvious. They have no idea how they are getting paid, or waste time trying to figure out what they should get paid.
With the advent of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, companies are attempting to automate the sales process and customer interactions. More and more sales people access CRM systems to get their job done. But there have been challenges in CRM adoption as sales people resist the solutions. If salespeople must access the CRM system to get access to their sales commission statements, they are more likely to use the CRM system for its intended purpose. If a salesperson knows they can help get paid accurately, they will make sure to keep the systems accurate and thus help keep the system up to date.
A sales commission solution that can accurately establish and calculate commissions and can seamlessly provide the sales commission statements for viewing by sales people can be a great advantage to firms. In addition to reducing commission errors, reducing time taken to administer and increasing sales people productivity, the solution can increase SuiteCRM adoptions.
QCommission is a powerful, flexible sales commission software tool. It calculates sales people's compensation accurately, quickly and professionally. QCommission is integrated with QuickBooks® but can also be operated stand- alone.
SuiteCRM is a free and Open Source CRM (Customer Relationship Manangement) software solution for SME and Enterprise. With the help of automation, SuiteCRM helps in increasing the reach of your business. It gives users highly actionable insights on which to base critical business decisions, actions, and strategies. You can use SuiteCRM to get insights on customer preferences by having regular conversations with them through an enhanced customer care service. There is no vendor lock-in so you can use it on your private cloud on your own server or a public cloud. This way you can multiply your customers by thousands in no time. SuiteCRM is designed to greatly improve business sales by enabling companies to bolster conversions, turn leads into customers, and drive innovation in product development and customer care.
Technology
SuiteCRM, supplies Web services, a pool of API calls for building applications and integrating with SuiteCRM objects. This set of APIs allows you to create and retrieve data from accounts. The platform also ensures that the third-party product is properly authenticated prior to getting access to the SuiteCRM data. TheSuiteCRM platform allows you to customize standard objects, build custom objects and fields. Use of the web service API calls along with SOAP information makes sure that the integration works well with the SuiteCRM. The CRM also ensures that the third-party product is properly authenticated prior to getting access to the data. All access to SuiteCRM is through the Web service API requests.
QCommission utilizes a technology called QXChange to integrate to other applications including SuiteCRM. Specific data access plug-ins (DAP) for different systems can be added to QXChange to integrate with various different data sources. A special DAP for SuiteCRM allows QCommission to exchange data with SuiteCRM.
Integration
Architecture
QCommission is a fully web-based SaaS application with the ability to be implemented as a public or private cloud application.
The plan designer is used to establish sales compensation plans for the sales force. The responsibility for this function typically lies with sales operations but can also be shared by finance or human resources. Commission plans can be unique by sales people or common across groups of people. Data for commission calculations can come from various sources but including Opportunities from the corporation’s CRM systems. Sales commissions can be calculated on opportunities, orders, invoices or payments. This is the primary data that is imported into QCommission. Opportunities within SuiteCRM can also be imported into QCommission and treated as transactions against which commissions should be calculated.
Various attributes of transactions can be used in the calculation of commissions. In many situations, sales reps are directly associated with transactions. This can be used in properly crediting the transaction to the sales rep prior to calculating commissions including sales credit splits. Other data attributes useful in commission calculations include Territory, Quantity, Profit, Customer, Product, etc.
Calculations are done on a periodic basis. The calculation process produces commission results for each individual sales person in the system. The most effective way of getting the commission results to the sales people is to present the results through a CRM system such as SuiteCRM. The presentation module in QCommission essentially presents the commission results directly to the sales force individually via SuiteCRM.
Data Objects
The QXChange layer loads data from the SuiteCRM to QCommission or vice versa. Any data table in SuiteCRM can be used to extract and load data.
Customers: This object shows the customer information of the company.
Products: This object shows which products of the company.
Opportunities: This object shows which source transactions were credited to which sales person.
The data is specific to each sales rep and the sales people can access their data in detail. Queries can be executed, and reports can be generated against these data objects.
Conclusion
QCommission does a tremendous job calculating individual commissions for the sales person. With the SuiteCRM, it brings the calculated data to the salesperson. With this integration it ties the two systems in such a manner that the complexity is reduced to a minimal level.
