Does your company, too, dread the audit time? World over, companies struggle to be audit-ready. The reasons are different: some do not follow the best practices; some are daunted by the complex processes, while others battle internal incompetence.
The need to be audit-ready in sales is critical because they deal directly with external clients and money. The information must be transparent and detailed, especially regarding sales professionals' compensation plans.
Sales commission calculations can be highly complex because they must consider aspects like seasonality, sales goals, company budget, and experience, among other things.
Manually keeping track of sales commissions and bonuses makes the process prone to errors, and the sales staff could suffer from delayed or incorrect payments. According to Gartner, manual sales compensation payouts see an average of 3 to 8% of errors.
This high incidence of error imposes high costs on companies in terms of extra manual labor for conflict resolution, revised payments, documentation fixes, and the lot. An easy way to nip problems in the bud is to embrace automation. In fact, automation in today's technological ecosystem delivers immediate benefits to the adopters.
Eliminate Errors
One of the most significant advantages of embracing automation is minimal errors. When human intervention is minimal, the chances of mistakes reduce drastically. Automation can do the job of many admin professionals at a fraction of the time and still guarantee accuracy and timeliness. Audits will not be a problem when the information is free of errors.
Real-time Data
For any audit to be effective, it needs access to real-time data. Automation-enabled commission software collects, processes, and stores the latest data, thus, giving any audit process access to the latest accurate data.
In automation-powered sales commission management platforms, data does not get stored in silos. Storing data in silos means there is a problem accessing relevant data when you need it.
With all the data stored in one centralized database, automation drives efficiency in the searching process. Such a process guarantees accuracy and timeliness.
Data Integrity
Imagine the chaos in an audit process because of a mistakenly inserted zero or a point (.). It can lead to a trail of errors and wrongly processed payments. Automation makes no such errors; thus, the data stored is always accurate and trustworthy.
Seamlessly integrating data from different sources becomes essential when dealing with multiple sales professionals. It helps aggregate data from various sources and automates data processing into one uniform output that the company and the auditors can export and understand.
Getting all the data into a centralized database allows users to download the latest, up-to-date files. It also facilitates updating all the relevant data in one go, instead of manually looking for appropriate fields and updating the latest numbers. Automation makes the review and approval process organized, easy to follow, or track, and improves back-office efficiency.
Audit Trails
Audit trails are vital to an audit process as the ability to rewind and see who inputted what data and at what time is a priceless feature. While manually operated spreadsheets may offer this feature to some extent, it will be impossible to track changes when multiple sales professionals, branches, and stakeholders are involved.
A uniform data ecosystem with automation leverages repeatable processes and formats to store data from various sources. It keeps detailed information on when and who inputs the data, giving auditors ready-to-access information when they want to trace a trail.
According to recent research from Harvard Business School, organizations know that compensation plans are key to driving sales behavior and hitting revenue targets. It’s why U.S. companies invest more than $200 billion in it.
As a result, saving time and money, and improving accuracy and communication and reporting are key benefits that result from the implementation of an automated commission management platform.
Start driving positive impacts on your entire business with the help of Blitz.