A Seattle-based startup wants to change the way many medium-sized companies handle their sales commissions – Excel spreadsheets. For most SMBs, enterprise-class incentive management systems aren’t an option due to their complexity and the lengthy consulting engagements they require to deploy. As a result, those organizations suffer from “spreadsheet hell” where any correction to sales commissions require a round-trip to finance. While manually distributing sales commission spreadsheets creates risk, spreadsheets also fail to provide reps with real-time access to their commission data. Spreadsheets also make it harder for reps to understand how their commissions were calculated.

Our solution eliminates all manual distribution of sales commission spreadsheets. Every rep gets a personal dashboard where they can enroll in incentive plans, access their commissions, and review crediting – real-time and from any device. In addition, our automation addresses other risks such as commission calculation errors, failing to legally protect plans, or failing to comply with accounting rules. More importantly, our solution gives companies a competitive edge. We’ve built a framework to modernize and energize the sales force by automating their sales commissions.

Sales Cookie’s cloud solution focuses on ease of use and includes wizards to easily design and manage incentive programs. However, the solution also includes capabilities found in enterprise-class systems – with a simplified presentation. Included is the ability to easily convert values between currencies, define multiple attainment levels, split commissions, run simulations, or generate custom reports. In addition, Sales Cookie uses patent-pending technology to lower the integration barrier and make it easy to consume data from various CRM and accounting systems.

“We’re constantly innovating and simplifying sales commission management. For example, our patent-pending technology lets users synchronize data from any SalesForce view simply by typing its name. We let administrators securely access all underlying sales commission data using visualizations such as Microsoft Power BI or Tableau. This allows them to create their custom reports, or even ask questions about commissions using natural language queries. Another example is our ability to execute mass payment of commissions via PayPal for agencies. Our goal is to disrupt the market and kill the sales commission spreadsheet. We’re helping SMBs automate their sales commissions in a cost-effective way.”

The cloud-based solution hosts sensitive data for customers in multiple continents. Because of its Seattle location, it was a natural choice for Sales Cookie to select Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform for secure data processing, and Auth0 (another Washington-based startup) for authentication. To further safeguard sales commission data, the company offers capabilities such as single sign on, intrusion detection, and encryption at rest. In addition, customers can create “sandboxes”, allowing them to run sales commission experiments without affecting production data. Finally, Sales Cookie’s solution includes an audit log tracking every change made to the system.

With many companies spending 10% or more of their revenue on commissions, sales incentive programs need to be taken seriously. It can be risky to let administrators modify spreadsheets without any traceability. Our solution implements different security roles, tracks every change made to the system, and even takes a full snapshot of a plan when running a calculation. We include a detailed log of every calculation – down to every penny. This helps organizations ensure their incentive program is cost-efficient and safe.

The cloud-based solution is available immediately at salescookie.com.