Commission engines
Rule-driven calculation with tiers, adjustments, clawbacks and a full audit trail.
- Engagement
- Fixed-scope build with finance sign-off on a live period
- Typical timeline
- 5–7 weeks
- Starts with
- Every commission agreement you have signed, including the ones agreed over email.
Your commission rules take three paragraphs to explain, they changed twice last year, and the one person who fully understands them is on leave when statements are due.
Payouts that are right the first time.
What we build
Concrete artefacts, handed over and documented.
A calculation engine that takes a sale and returns the commission with its full workings, rate applied, tier reached, adjustments included
Tier logic: thresholds, whether an uplift is retroactive or forward-only, and what happens to a partner who drops back down
Clawbacks and adjustments recorded as ledger entries rather than edits, so a corrected figure never overwrites the original
Versioned rules with effective dates, so last March is calculated the way March’s agreement said and not the way today’s does
Replay on demand: any period recalculated, with the difference explained line by line
An immutable ledger that finance reconciles and an auditor can inspect
What changes
The same sale always produces the same commission, whoever runs the calculation and whenever they run it
A rule change ships without rewriting history or reopening closed periods
A dispute is answered with a line-by-line breakdown in minutes
How it runs
- Week 1
01Extract the rules
We turn your contracts, side agreements and verbal exceptions into a rules table. Clients are usually surprised by how many exceptions exist.
- Weeks 2–4
02Engine
Calculation, tiers, adjustments and versioning, tested by replaying twelve months of real sales against statements you have already issued.
- Weeks 5–7
03Ledger and sign-off
The ledger, the reconciliation view, and one period closed on the new engine while finance checks it against the old method.
Chosen per project. Named here so you can see the shape of it.
- Postgres
- Temporal
- Metabase
Questions we get asked
Tell us the outcome, not the tooling.
Send us the situation you are in. We will tell you which discipline it belongs to, what we would do first and what it costs, including when the answer is to wait.