Manufacturing Industry Sales Commission

QCommission enables you to quickly calculate commission, draw and bonuses, verify results and distribute this information to your account executives, recruiters, consultants and managers. Present the commission information in such a way that your staff clearly understands what they are being paid and why they are being paid at a very detailed level. Excel and manual calculations can introduce a lot of errors into your calculations and cause your staff to lose trust in you. QCommission can help avoid that by calculating all commissions systematically and reliably.

• Pay employees, manufacturer rep agencies, brokers, and distributors
• Track sales at rep level but pay commissions to agencies.
• Have unique commission plans by payees.
• Split commissions between payees.
• Credit sales to payee by order, customer, territory, and other criteria.
• Split commissions between sold-to and ship-to territories
• Pay commissions at the time of sales order, invoicing or when customer pays.
• Pay commissions as flat amounts or as percentages.
• Pay commissions on quota based tiered attainment of sales.
• Pay different commission rates by products.
• Pay commissions by sales or profit.
• Vary commission rate by discounting.
• Adjust commission payouts by expenses.
• Pay overrides to sales managers.
• Pay weekly, bi-weekly, twice-monthly, monthly, quarterly, etc.
• Present commission statements and payout summary via workflow for approvals.
• Calculate and pay in multiple currencies.
• Calculate and pay royalties to third parties based on products

Import/ Export

• Import data from CRM system including Customers and closed Opportunities.
• Import data from accounting system including Invoices, Expenses, Payees, Customers, and Products.
• Import data from multiple varies POS files of distributors, identify and correct errors and mapping.
• Import from manufacturer data from Excel, PDF and fixed or text-delimited files.
• Export Commissions payouts for accounts payable and payroll data formats
• Export to multiple countries’ payrolls for pay-checks
• Export data to Excel, and fixed or text-delimited file formats

Reporting

• Produce detailed commission statements by payee
• Reproduce commission statements for prior periods
• Report on split credits and uncredited transactions
• Analyze historical transaction and payment information
• Email commission statements to payees
• View commission statements through the web

Nilfisk is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of professional commercial and industrial cleaning equipment, with an annual turnover of EUR 1059M. The company employs 5,600 people globally and markets hundreds of different models of floor cleaning and maintenance equipment, through a global network of distributors.

The Nilfisk Group is headquartered in Denmark, with sales companies in 45 countries around the world, a strong distributor network, and manufacturing facilities in 9 countries.

Nilfisk markets and sells its products in more than 100 countries worldwide including North and South America, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. Its European, Middle East and South African sales and marketing activities are managed through a network of Nilfisk subsidiaries.

The Problem 

Nilfisk sells hundreds of different models of floor cleaning and maintenance equipment and parts. Commissions are calculated differently depending on types of Accounts as well as on types of Products, and Payee’s Role.

Here are some of highlights of commission calculation challenges faced by the company:

• Sales Volume for crediting for each transaction can be applied to multiple eligible Sales Associates. This is not a split of the commission, it is an actual crediting of volume to different plans.
• Some commissions are flat rate, based on products (Sales Commission)
• Some are a tier rate matrix, by position/role, that use attainment % for the tier qualification (Sales Bonus)
• Because of product-based rates, every sales transaction has to be read at the line level.
• Currency-based conversions of payouts, to handle payments in both U.S.A = USD $ and Canadian = CAD$
• Some Senior Sales Managers receiving overrides for supporting less experienced Sales Associates.

The Manager of Corporate Services in the U.S. Floorcare Group was in the market looking for a solution to calculate their complex commission plan. Initially they felt the need to automate their commission calculation because:

• Company wanted to increase efficiency and ability to pay and manage commissions in a more visible manner to the Sales Associates. (Specifically wanted Sales Associates to know they were being properly paid properly, by providing them a personal commission statement and supporting sales data to confirm the calculations and amounts paid.)
• Desired an Audit Trail / record of payment

After U.S Floorcare’s implementation of QCommission, the Industrial Vacuum Division, also chose to install QCommission to (in addition to above reasons):

• Decrease time spent calculating and paying commissions, to free-up Finance (Accountant) Resource’s time, to focus more on operational goals and measures.
• To increase consistent accuracy of payments, and build trust in the payout process from the Sales Team.

Per Nilfisk IVACS Senior Accountant, Kim Cooke:

(Pre-QCommission…) “We were reviewing each order manually to make sure it was being allocated to the correct territory. This was done daily and it was a very time consuming process. The month-end process was: the report was reviewed and manually entered into a spreadsheet. We had numerous errors doing it manually, which caused problems in future months.”

 The Project

They decided to go with QCommission after seeing the capabilities to handle the requirements for payment of both: 1) Commissions and 2) Bonus/Incentives. Kim, along with the Division’s Controller, worked with the QCommission Team to implement the solution.

Per Kim: “The Qcommission team was very professional. They started by learning what we specifically needed as our final output. They then went thru our options, so we could better understand the system and what it could do for us. They helped with all aspects of getting information from our system to be uploaded into QCommission. They were able to customize our system so that it uploaded and calculated our complex commissions.”

Testing highlighted some additional exceptions, which were resolved in a timely manner. Once results were validated, the QCommission Team held both Training classes and then hands-on work sessions.

Overall Highlights:

• Two currency rates, USD and CAD, standard payout for US-Based and a currency conversion required for Canada-Based Sales Associates.
• Monthly Commission and Quarterly Bonus payouts.
• Two different commission plans, position based, paying monthly, each credit and pay under different product-based rates.
• Two different bonus plans, paying quarterly, each with a tiered rate matrix, by position, using attainment % for lookup, for tier qualification.
• Quarterly Bonus Plans, are based on performance toward an Annual goal, so require Annual ‘true-up’.
• Two different overrides on sales, State specific within Territories, paid to select senior level Sales Managers.
• Approximately 40 payees.

Business Benefits

With these automated solutions, the company now enjoys the benefits of:

• Faster processing and accurate commission calculations
• Increased trust in payouts by Sales Associates
• Timely distribution of commission statements to their internal Sales Associates
• Optional access to commission statements for their distributor network Representatives through a QCommission Portal.