Setting Commission in a Batch

Updated September 25, 2026 12:25

Overview

Commission may be set on a job by job basis or en masse through the maintenance are of admin across a found set of qualified jobs. We recommend processing commissions on a job by job basis for the first 2 rotations of commission settings before you attempt to set commissions in a large found set. Setting commissions job by job will gain you familiarity with the error message for incomplete processes that cause commissions to not be set. Also, batch setting of commissions cannot be undone. Therefore, having experience with the system, setting commissions individually will provide a base understanding of the process in general and aid you in not committing mistakes that cannot be undone.

Continue with these steps once you feel comfortable around the commission setting process. You may refer to the paper called “Commission Structure Setup” to learn how to setup commission structures for personnel and how to set commissions on a job by job basis.

Preparation

Run the Confirm Jobs and Confirm Payments maintenance routines from the admin area prior to running any commission report. The ensures all jobs have been refreshed for any recent activity.

Step 1

Create a found set of jobs ready to have commission calculated. Do this by filtering jobs by status in the Job Progress Custom report. Navigate to reports, select the Job Costing category (this category could still be “status” reports depending on your version of the system). Select the Job Progress Customer report and enter a date range. Typically, this date range is from the beginning of time (01/01/0001) to the last date entered in the commission processing month. This will capture all commission settings up to that point.

Generate the report. The next screen allows you to filter the jobs by the criteria that should be completed before commission can be set. For example, you may select to filter all open jobs where invoicing is completed, cost verification is complete, commission has not yet been set and the job is paid. This filter group would be:

Closed Status = Open, Invoiced Status = Complete, Commission Status = Unset, Paid Status = Paid and Verified Status = Verified

Click the Locate button to create the found set. Once the report generates, the system creates this as the found set in Sales/Orders. Next, you need to click the magnifying glass on one of the jobs to review the number of jobs and that it look about right to you

Step 2

Navigate directly to the Admin Screen and click the Maintenance button. Inside the Maintenance button select the option to “Set Commissions”

Confirm that you want to set commissions on all jobs that meet the appropriate commission criteria.

You will have an option to set commissions on a pre-selected set of job records or all job records. Select “Last Found” to set commissions on the found set you just created in step 1

Enter the date you want the commissions to be set and click “proceed”. The date is typically the last date of the month for which commission are beig processed

Step 3

Once the routine for setting commission is complete (you will receive a completion message), you will be able to run the commissions owed report to view, correct and print the calculated commissions.

Navigate to the reports area and click on the Commission category (this could be the Personnel category depending on your system version).

Select the “commissions owed” report and enter a date range (preferably ending with the last date you entered when setting commissions). Generate the report.

The report generates a summary report and offers a personnel by personnel detail option once the report has been generated. The summary report will show the cumulative commissions to be paid out per staff member

Clicking on a magnifying glass next to a staff member’s name will display the detail job by job and show commissions owed on each job

From this screen, commissions can be manually adjusted (note the Edit message dialogue box above in figure 3.2) if necessary, either with a direct edit from this position in the process, or by going to the job record and adjusting job cost results (such as adding admin costs that reduce profit thereby reducing commission). Once the controller is satisfied with the commission amounts for the time period, all of the commissioned jobs may be set to “paid” status en masse by marking all jobs by all staff members “paid” on the summary screen

Most users complete the commission process simply working onscreen as illustrated above, and in addition to the steps of processing within the system, most businesses also print a paper copy of the final approved commissions to be (1) submitted for payroll processing and (2) filed for future reference as part of the permanent paper files / backup related to commission earnings.