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Entering commissions or bonuses in your forecast

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Chris Iacofano

For some salaried employees, such as sales reps, you may wish to represent a commission or bonus paid in addition to the base salary.  LivePlan can build commission or bonus payments based on a percentage of your sales.

Base salary and commission should be shown as separate entries. For each employee or group of employees who will be paid a commission or bonus, you will need to create two entries in your forecast: one Personnel entry representing the base salary, and one entry representing the commission/bonus.

Creating the base salary entry

Please see Entering Personnel for instructions on how to create the salary entry. You can create an entry for an individual employee or a group of employees. Many commissioned employees are considered direct labor employees - if you're not sure which option to use for this entry, see What is the difference between direct labor and regular labor?

In the example below, we've forecast a salary for group of five sales reps. The monthly salary and employee-related expenses are now shown in the Personnel table:

personnel table detail with five sales representatives shown.png

Creating the commission entry

Once you've added the base salary for the employee or group of employees, you can add their commission or bonuses. To do this you'll add another Personnel item, set it as a Direct Cost and then calculated it based on a percentage of overall sales or a specific revenue stream:

  1. Click the Add Personnel button and give the commission/bonus item a name:

    sales team bonuses personnel entry name detail.png

  2. Next, choose the Direct Labor option and specify On-staff employee to add employee-related expenses to the bonus:

    personnel entry detail direct labor on staff employee shown.png

  3. Click Next to proceed to the commission amount:

    Next button .png
  4. Select whether to calculate the commission or bonus off of a specific revenue stream or overall revenue and set it's percentage:

    revenue entry sales team bonus details highlighted.png
  5. Click Create & Exit to create the forecast entry and return to the Personnel page:
    create and exit.png

In the example above, we've added a 6% bonus (on overall Revenue) for our Sales Representatives, and in the Personnel table, that will look like this:

personnel table with sales representatives and bonuses.png

 

More on personnel:

 

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