On second thought…
At first, it seems like the obvious way to begin. You need to manage incentive compensation for your business? You turn to everyone’s favorite multipurpose tool: Excel. And why not? There are good reasons why countless finance teams and sales operations pros rely on Excel to help them manage a nearly limitless number of projects and processes: it’s inexpensive, ubiquitous, and simple to use. If you’re managing incentive comp for a couple dozen reps, Excel is a solid option.
But, as is true in most cases with Excel, there are limits. In fact, once you reach 50 people to calculate compensation for, most companies encounter unresolvable obstacles and major breakdowns. The pain is severe, swift, and unrelenting, and the second thoughts about software selection are inescapable:
Data Imports
Your comp plan needs lots of important data from your CRM, billing, and human capital management systems. That means periodic data dumps, manual pre-processing (think: cutting and pasting tens of thousands of cells in external spreadsheets, changing labels, and performing additional calculations and transformations… just to bring it into your 50- tab workbook.
To read full download the whitepaper:
Stepping Up From Excel For Sales Commissions
