Sales commission tracking can be one of the most complex tasks that haunt business executives and payroll personnel. Commissions frequently vary significantly within a business, especially among ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ sales personnel. In fact it is not uncommon for some firms to negotiate specific sales commission provisions with each sales staff member they ‘contract with’, making each new contract its own 'commission plan'.
Because of the importance of getting sales commission data correct, as well as the complexity and variable nature of commission calculations, it is almost impossible to produce the necessary reporting from standard QuickBooks reports. In fact even custom reporting software may not be able to put together the necessary information for each individual earning commissions in order to accurately compute their compensation.
QCommission is powerful and flexible commission software that calculates sales people’s earnings and reduces errors related from trying to use multiple QuickBooks Reports flowing in to different spreadsheets in an attempt to manually determine what they should be paid. I have found that while it takes patience and understanding, QCommission can be fully integrated with QuickBooks in order to streamline the process whereby ‘sales data becomes commission reports’.
QCommission allows you to calculate commissions as soon as the commission period is over. You can easily establish, using the Plan Wizard (Figure 2), those individuals in your QuickBooks file that are going to get paid commissions, what products (QB-items) commissions can be earned upon, any customers whose sales are not compensable, and then set all the plans, incentives, quotas, and payment frequencies that apply in your own situation. It also permits the establishment of crediting and calculation rules for various incentives. Performance transactions can be processed, credited and calculated as frequently as necessary, even multiple times in a day. Adjustments to the transactions can be made and processed when warranted.
QCommission is proven in its ability to not only extrapolate sales data from your QuickBooks file seamlessly, but format that data into the necessary configuration such that the ‘commission rules’, no matter how complex can be applied and commissions determined. Once that process is complete, QCommission then goes about producing complete and comprehensive reporting on all the calculations it made in both detailed and summary presentations. (Figure 3.)
QXchange is the integration tool that links QCommission with QuickBooks. (See the illustration in Figure 4.) Identification of the appropriate data within QuickBooks is essential to the correct commissions. For example, commissions are generally paid on sales revenues. In some cases this may involve QuickBooks transactions such as invoices, sales receipts or sales orders. While ‘sales’ may go through a variety of life stages including ‘point-of-sale transaction’, “sales order placed”, invoiced order or paid order, commission models vary from one business to another on how each of these life stages impacts a given individuals’ earnings. Some businesses pay commission on ‘invoiced orders’, others pay only when invoices are paid, and some businesses pay commission based on both. Sales adjustments and cancellations of sales also impact proper compensation. QCommission understands these transactional variations and the sales life stages, and can appropriate the necessary information from QuickBooks for not only the immediate period, but continuing history to determine base commissions as well as adjustments.
But importing data, computing commissions, and reporting, isn’t the only thing you should expect from commission software that integrates with QuickBooks; you should also be able to get the ‘commission results’ back to the point of payment. Some businesses will add commission compensation to paychecks; others will pay commissions using a separate ‘check’. In either case QCommission can provide the resources needed to update payroll information for a specific employee, or create an A/P transaction within QuickBooks payable to the commission recipient.
CellarStone, Inc., the makers of QCommission also make a ‘lighter weight’ (aka: “less expensive”) commission computation software called ‘Easy Commission’. While some of the features are similar to QCommission, you don’t have nearly the functionality or capabilities of QCommission if you elect to use Easy Commission. Individual businesses will need to carefully work with their ProAdvisors and/or CellarStone Partners to determine which of the two products will actually meet the needs of their commission payments based upon the unique characteristics and commission plan designs.
Let me mention ‘service and support’, many times product reviews like this tend to skip over this area because it is hard to really know these details if you are not actually using the product on a regular basis and are only working the manufacturer using a trial copy to write an article. Well let me just say that there have been a few instances in which I needed to contact QCommission support to assist with a specific issue. For example, when one of my client’s upgraded to QuickBooks 2014, there was an issue created with how QCommission was linking-up (or not linking up) to the new version since the older version was still on the computer. I had about a 3 minute wait time to get hold of an actual support representative, and then found myself in a ‘support session’ about 3 minutes thereafter. It didn’t take long for them to resolve the issue, and when they ask me about a follow-up, they were on the phone exactly at the time we had agreed for their follow-up call to insure everything was still going OK. I find this ‘level of support’ outstanding when you compare it to many other vendors we deal with regarding 3rd-party integration products.
I have several QuickBooks clients using QCommission, and all of them are more than satisfied with the results, even more so are their employees who feel like they are getting paid what they earned. That is not to say that ‘we’, as ProAdvisors helping our clients get this product configured, don’t have a lot of work to get QCommission up and going by the time they are supposed to be paying that first commission check, but once everything is configured ‘according to plan’, it just keeps going, and going, and going (like a certain ‘bunny’ I remember on the TV).