Best Practice - Adjusting Commissions

Best Practice - Adjusting Commissions


Here are some recommendations when manually adjusting commissions. Adjusting commissions is a complex topic because they are different ways to adjust. We hope the following recommendations will help you.

Analyze Adjustment Frequency
Assuming your sales data and commission rules are correct, adjusting commissions should be rare. The need for manual adjustments defeats the goal of automating commissions. Having to make many adjustments may indicate data quality issues, or missing commission rules. Our technical team can help you configure missing commission rules and reduce the need for manual adjustments.

Use Consistent Adjustments
While there are many ways to adjust commissions, they all fall into 2 categories:
  • Edit per-transaction amounts             OR
  • Edit manual rewards

Use a consistent method. For example, suppose that you increased a per-transaction commission amount from $5 to $100. Later, you want to decrease it back from $100 to $5. You should use the same method. You should decrease the per-transaction amount from $100 back to $5. Deleting the +$95 manual adjustment won't change the specified per-transaction amount of $100. It will change the total payout, but not the per-transaction amount.

Adjust Commissions When Final
Adjust when your calculation is almost ready to release. While it's always possible to re-calculate after making adjustments, this creates complex edge cases and some ambiguity. 

For example, suppose that you have different tiers and rates. You changed the commission rate on a transaction from 5% to 10%. When re-calculating, we find that this transaction now falls within a different tier. It's not entirely obvious what should happen. Should your manual 10% override be preserved? Or should the new tier's rate be applied (since it's different from previous)? In many cases, the answer is murky. For this reason, adjust when your calculation is near-final and re-calculation is not required.

Use Bulk Tools
If you have more than 25 adjustments to make, consider using a bulk tool (under Settings > Tools). Here are some of the tools you can use to bulk-adjust commissions. If you have more than 1000 adjustments, our team can configure a plan which processes CSV adjustment data, and adds manual rewards. Reach out for assistance.
 


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