Sales Commission Reporting: Must Know Hacks & Tips

Sales commission reporting is important beyond compliance and regulation. Proper and timely sales commission reporting can end up impacting your sales team’s productivity and motivation. Ultimately, how you take care of your incentive compensation management can even have an effect on your customer’s satisfaction.

In this article, we will cover how to make sales commission reporting easier for everyone involved in the processes.

Coming Up

1. How Does Sales Compensation Reporting Improves Sales Performance?

2. Why is Data Key to Drive Sales Performance?

3. What are the Key Stakeholder Groups for Reporting?

4. What are Reporting Hacks for Sales People?

5. What are Reporting Hacks for Executives?

6. What are Reporting Hacks for Finance?

7. What are Reporting Hacks for Administrators?

8. What are Best Practices for Sales Commision Reports?

9. What are the Benefits of Automation Solutions?

10. The Bottom Line

How Does Sales Compensation Reporting Improve Sales Performance?

You already know that your sales compensation reporting definitely affects your accounting and finance functions. But, after reading that intro, you may be wondering how your reporting practices could impact your sales team’s functioning.

Well, research has shown that there are seven fundamental aspects that are said to help to drive a high-performing sales culture. These include:

• Develop a culture of accountability
• Sales managers should be coaches
• Healthy competition is acceptable and promoted
• Each individual employee should be the champion of their own sales process
• Technology is utilised as needed and efficiently
• Data is readily available and adequately utilised
• The sales force shares in a common goal, where everyone is aware of their own roles
  

With a financial automation tool, you can ensure that your sales compensation reporting processes cover all of these crucial elements to drive forward your team’s success.

Why is Data Key to Drive Sales Performance?

When it comes to sales, you know that at the top of the list of important things sits the numbers! The numbers say it all, and in reality, these numbers are data.

From documenting sales to paying out commissions, you can’t have sales commission reporting without accurate data. But the data takes your team’s capabilities beyond just recording what’s already happened.

The data can be used for insights. Every sales team’s worst nightmare is customer churn. Not only is it said to cost 5x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing customer, but it also can end up harming a business’ reputation (not to mention their bottom line)  if customer churn levels are high.

Well-equipped financial automation tools provide you with access to up-to-date data and real-time analytics that can divide up your customers into segments.

You can see which customers are ready for an upsale, where prospective customers are, and which customers are most at-risk for churning. All of this data can be used to drive sales performance, all the while, your accounting team can automate the sales commission reporting processes.

What are the Key Stakeholder Groups for Reporting?

Quality over quantity, right? When it comes to sales commission reporting and data, you want the right amount of information, not an overwhelming amount of information.

Finance automation tools like SolveXia make it easy to customise your dashboard and gain access to the information you need at any time, without having to dig.

Since it’s important to have access to what you need, when you need it, it’s of great value to define what each respective stakeholder throughout the process needs access to. For example, when it comes to sales commission reporting, there are several players involved namely:

• Sales stakeholders - those on the ground who are interested in their performance and commission earnings
  

• Administrators - those who need to ensure that sales commission reporting is accurate and supporting the sales process
  

• Compliance stakeholders - those who need to ensure that the program is working and that regulations are being upheld
  

• Executive stakeholders - those who need to know the big picture to evaluate sales strategies
  

• Accounting stakeholders - those who work behind-the-scenes to procure documentation and reports that reflect the sales, revenue, payments, etc. accurately

What are Reporting Hacks for Sales People?

Sales people need to focus their time on doing what they get paid to do - sell! As such, they can’t spend days in systems or moving data across spreadsheets to find out how to calculate commission percentage.

Instead, sales people need access to a system that quickly lets them see their revenues versus their targeted revenue. With a system like SolveXia, sales personnel can calculate their commissions in seconds rather than relying on spreadsheets.

Want a hack for sales people to spruce up the playing field?

Create a leaderboard and allow each member of the team to track how their fellow sales personnel are performing. This way, you can develop some friendly competition. Since everyone’s incentives are aligned with commissions to sell more, the competitive aspect can further boost performance.

What are Reporting Hacks for Executives?

Executives care about the overall landscape, and of course, the bottom line. So, for executives, it’s useful to customise a report that can break down how each sales person is performing. Or, they may want to look at last year’s numbers versus where the team is at now to see if changes need to be made.

With the right analytics at their fingertips, executives can make analytical and data-driven decisions to improve the sales team’s output.

A tool like SolveXia’s rebate management (and commissions) solution can be utilised on-the-go via mobile devices. This way, busy executives running between meetings can always have access to the exact information and reports that they need.

What are Reporting Hacks for Finance?

Besides the sales people on the ground doing the legwork to grow revenues, the accounting team is also busy at work managing the numbers and commissions calculations.

As teams grow bigger or the workload scales, accounting teams can easily become bogged down if they are expected to manually manage sales commission reporting.

From having to collect data across disparate systems, sales teams, regions, and the likes, the chances of mistakes, missing data, or duplicate data can become overbearing.

Instead, finance teams can make the most out of a sales commission automation solution that will automate the process for financial statement creation, reporting, and adhering to compliance regulations like ASC 606, for example.

Let’s consider SolveXia’s solution as an example. The benefits for the finance team include: sales commission reporting efficiency, reduced errors, assured compliance, process standardisation, shortened sales cycles and payouts, and more.

What are Reporting Hacks for Administrators?

Administrators have a lot to tackle on a daily basis. So, for them, it’s of use to grant them the ability of seeing different types of reports. Administrators can build a daily checklist of things to do with reports tied to the steps. This way, they can reduce the chance of something slipping through the cracks.

Rather than having to manually clean up data and execute calculations, the software can do these tasks for them. As a result, you free up your administrators time to focus on more pressing tasks that are not meant to be automated.

What are Best Practices for Sales Commision Reports?

Now that we’ve taken a look at some of the ways in which sales commissions reports can be used to optimise the duties of each type of stakeholder involved, let’s look at what makes for a good sales commission report.

1. Tailor the Report

As we’ve mentioned before, “less is more.” And, context matters. So, the information you choose to customise the report with will depend on your audience. For example, salespeople need a quick view of earnings.

Executives will want a breakdown of earnings by region or team member. Focus the report based on who is reading it. With a finance automation solution, this is easy to do, as you can set up the software to pull and send each customised report to the right people.

2. Label Data Clearly

Make sure to label data so that everyone involved can understand the numbers. Another one of the benefits of an automation solution for sales commission reporting is that you can customise an easy-to-read dashboard.

3. Use Text and Imagery

Just like labeling your data, include a balance of text and imagery (such as charts) so that the report can be reviewed quickly or in-depth, while still providing value.

4. Create a Logical Flow

Make sure that the order of information makes sense for your audience. Again, when customising reports within a software system, you only have to set it up once (or choose from an existing template) and then trust that the system will keep your preferences applied.

What are the Benefits of Automation Solutions?

Automation solutions align every member on the team on the same page. The solution makes sales commission reporting seamless. In turn, your team members get to focus on the strategic and creative aspects of their job, rather than having to be bogged down with data and calculations.

Automation solutions pull data from any source and centralise it. Tools like SolveXia can cleanse and transform data so that all your data management needs are handled. When dealing with commissions, the reporting and documentation can quickly become chaotic, if done manually.

With the aid of an automated solution, sales reps can continue selling without having to think twice about their commissions and earnings. Finance professionals no longer have to spend their time searching for data or manueving the data to create individualised reports.

In turn, your company’s leadership and team can allocate energy and time to reviewing and optimising sales tactics.

The Bottom Line

Sales commission reporting should be a useful asset. With financial automation solutions, your organisation can streamline the process of creating reports. Every stakeholder can gain access to the specific information they need to do their jobs as best as possible.

‍