Solution Sheet / Sales Commission Management (2026)

1. SITUATION
An important goal for any sales commission process is the
ability to generate fast, error-free commission calculations
and to rapidly communicate these results to the salesforce.
The sales organization should not be constrained by how much
data is needed or how frequently they want to calculate and
communicate commissions. Furthermore, they need to be able
to quickly adapt their commission plans to changes in business
strategy driven by shifting market conditions.
To meet expectations and address constant change, executives
need to equip their organizations with sales commission
systems that are easy to deploy and flexible, ensure fast and
accurate data processing, and seamlessly integrate with related
business processes.
CHALLENGES
Despite these requirements, many sales commission
management systems still pose various challenges:
• Siloed, disparate data sources and lack of effective capabilities
to gather, centralize and prepare relevant sales commission
data for use in calculations. This often results in payment errors
and additional work to fix them.
• Lack of flexibility in defining and managing complex
commission plan rules and exceptions as required by evolving
business needs. This leads to costly and time-consuming
deployment and change management practices.
• Ineffective reports that only summarize calculated commissions
without providing actionable insights. This type of reporting
barely helps in improving sales performance.
• Lack of automation capabilities for key business processes
such as plan communication. This leads to error-prone manual
work, confusion, and a drop in productivity across the various
roles involved in sales commission management.
SOLUTION SHEET
Sales commission management
Assessing a sales
commission solution?
Make sure it can be:
Deployed rapidly to achieve
immediate impact.
Choose an out-of-the-box
sales commission solution
that simply requires loading
data and setting user access.
Changed easily without
relying on technical
resources.
Choose a solution that
enables business users as well
as developers to change data
structures, business rules,
workflows, and other user
apps to fit specific business
needs.
Expanded to deliver more
value with no-code app
development.
Choose a solution that
expands data preparation,
integration of new data
sources, addition of new user
apps, and more –
all without any coding.
Extended beyond solution
requirements using a unified
no-code platform.
Choose a solution platform
that provides a unified
standard data model, unified
process automation, and a
unified experience for
all users.

2. SOLUTION
Optymyze provides no-code business process
automation that eliminates the challenges
posed by traditional sales commission systems.
Sales Commission Management is built on
the Optymyze unified, no-code platform and
automates sales commission management
and related business processes for every role
involved in them.
For instance, salespeople benefit from plan
communication and governance, what-
if calculators, and performance insights
to improve their sales performance, while
analysts and sales leaders leverage the
compensation model builder, plan performance
insights, dispute and payment management
workflows and notifications to improve
process efficiency, overall.
Optymyze offers an out-of-the-box solution
that accelerates deployment and a standard
data model that ensures seamless integration
with other solutions built on the Optymyze
platform.
Plan Communication and Governance
The main purpose of any sales commission
plan is to align sales behaviors to corporate
objectives. Therefore, it is critical to ensure
that the plan mechanics and plan results are
clearly understood by the salesforce.
Plan Communication and Governance conveys
commission plan rules through plan documents
and requires plan document acceptance
as a condition to accessing commission
information. Plan acceptances are tracked and
summarized for analysts to take appropriate
actions on pending ones.
Additionally, plan results are communicated
through period-ending snapshots, such as
commission statements and payment ledgers.
Mobile-friendly commission statements convey
the math behind commission calculations
in an easy-to-understand manner. Payment
ledgers provide a running tally of earnings and
payments that is quickly accessible from any
device.
Commission statement example
Compensation Models
Sales commission plans typically consist of
one or more unique calculation types or plan
components that vary depending on the plan
design. This, in turn, is influenced by the sales
behaviors that each plan is expected to drive.
The complexity of calculations also varies
among different plans and components within
the same plan.
Compensation Model Builder provides an
innovative approach that simplifies and
removes the guesswork from the process of
building a commission plan. It allows analysts
to easily handle the variation and complexity
SOLUTION SHEET

3. of calculations through pre-defined templates
– which have been synthesized from a variety
of calculation types observed among multiple
commission plan types across industries – and
variety of plan parameters and modifiers.
To simplify the process even more, the
compensation model builder enables analysts
to build a plan by answering questions and
selecting options on their mobile devices. The
compensation model builder is based on a
standard, extensible data model that allows for
rapid deployments, as well as easy changes to
meet unique business needs.
In addition, mobile-friendly standard what-
if calculators allow individuals to estimate
commissions using the most current data.
They are based on live commission plans,
which increases the accuracy of commission
estimations.
Left screenshot: mobile view of a scenario comparison
- Average Earnings
Middle and right screenshots: mobile views of a what-
if calculator
Moreover, standard scenario comparisons
allow analysts to compare different
compensation scenarios and roll out selected
ones as finalized commission plans.
Performance Insights
Typical sales commission reporting consists of
commission statements and sales summaries
for salespeople, and some form of aggregated
commission payment summaries and total
sales for analysts and sales leaders. This type
of reporting only provides a snapshot of
information at a point in time, which is hardly
actionable.
Desktop and mobile views of a performance
insights report – Earnings Benchmark
Performance Insights takes reporting to
the next level. For instance, the Earnings
Change and Earnings Benchmark reports
utilize intelligent algorithms to analyze
individual earnings, as well as trends and
comparisons against benchmarks, to provide
each salesperson with specific actionable
insights. They also summarize the analyzed
information for sales leaders, providing
them with more visibility into their team’s
earnings performance. Similarly, the Budget
Analysis report analyzes overall earnings on a
commission plan to provide insights into that
plan’s effectiveness.
SOLUTION SHEET

4. Dispute Management
Typically, any inquiries or disputes that
salespeople initiate regarding their sales
commissions are handled through email
communications. For organizations with large
salesforces, the sheer volume of disputes and
inquiries can become overwhelming, making
email a highly inefficient tool for handling
them.
Dispute Management enables salespeople
to initiate crediting and payment disputes
or to submit general inquiries and sends
them notifications upon resolution. It
enables analysts to review and resolve any
open disputes or inquiries. In addition, it
provides analysis of trends of dispute and
inquiry volumes and resolutions, enabling
collaboration with others to continuously
improve the dispute management process.
Moreover, Dispute Management gives access
to systematic audit trails, which allow for
better dispute process governance.
Payment Management
Paying error-free sales commissions on time
is key to keeping the salesforce motivated. To
ensure commission payment timeliness and
accuracy, many companies go through the
process of reviewing and then approving the
payments before releasing them to payroll.
Payment Management leverages the
commission plans created with the
compensation model builder to calculate
payments for the salesforce. It also utilizes
no-code workflows and notifications to enable
sales leaders to review and approve the
payments for their team members. In addition,
it provides analyses and reporting of overall
payment trends and threshold-based outliers
that enable analysts to quickly identify and
resolve discrepancies before payments are
approved and sent to payroll.
ACHIEVE THE BEST OUTCOMES
WITH OPTYMYZE
Sales Commission Management simplifies
the sales commission management process,
allowing organizations to:
• Promote transparency and salespeople’s trust
with plan communication and governance;
• Simplify commission plan building with an
innovative compensation model builder;
• Motivate the salesforce with individualized
what-if calculators;
• Improve sales and earnings performance with
individualized performance insights;
• Improve commission plan effectiveness with
plan performance insights;
• Resolve commission disputes faster with a
systematic dispute management process;
• Ensure accurate and timely payments with
workflows that streamline the payment
management process.
SOLUTION SHEET
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