Is this article for you?
Do you need to automate commission modifications based on a set of conditions?
Yes - this article is for you
No - see Step 6
Where to go
Admin > Finance: Commission Runner Rules
A commission rule is a set of specified conditions and actions used to modify the standard commission calculation. The actions specified in a rule will be applied to a commission transaction if the commission transaction satisfies the specified conditions. Existing commission rules can be viewed by going to ‘Admin > Finance > Config > Commission Runner Rules’. From here, a rule can be edited or deleted by clicking the appropriate icon in the grid row next to a rule, and a new rule can be created by clicking the ‘Create New Rule’.
Creating a Rule
A rule must have a description, which makes your rule set easier to manage and will also show up in reports of which rules were processed for a given batch or commission transaction – be as descriptive as possible without making an overly lengthy description. A specific processor can be chosen for a rule, or the rule will be applied to all batches regardless of processors. A rule may also be temporarily enabled or disabled by choosing ‘Enabled’ or ‘Disabled’ from the dropdown at the bottom of the form. Detailed explanations of adding conditions and actions are supplied below.
Reordering Rules
An important note is that rules will ‘stack’ or build off each other. For instance if a commission transaction satisfies one rule which modifies the payee’s commission percentage to be 80% rather than their regular 6%, and later satisfies a second rule which sets a flat payee total of zero dollars, at the end of processing the payee will receive zero dollars regardless of the commission bucket amount. Therefore it can be important to specify the order or precedence in which rules are applied. In the ‘Reorder Rules’ interface, simply drag and drop the rules for each processor into the desired order and click ‘Save Order’.
Also note that any rules you create which apply to ‘All Processors’ instead of a specific one are considered to be ‘top-level’ rules, which means that they are applied last. While this seems counter-intuitive at first, consider that if you have a ‘top-level’ rule for all processors where a salesperson who is newer than 90 days should receive a flat total of zero, you want this rule to be applied after all other processor-specific rules have been processed, ensuring the salesperson receives zero dollars.
Rule Conditions
Rule conditions are criteria that are tested to see whether a rule action or set of rule actions will be performed on a commission transaction. Any number of conditions can be added to one rule by clicking the ‘Add Rule’ button. Clicking ‘Add Rule’ in the header bar of the conditions list will insert a new condition at the top of the list, and clicking ‘Add Rule’ next to a condition will insert a new condition beneath that rule. Note that the order of the conditions is not important, but can make a set of conditions easier to understand. You can specify whether any or all conditions in a set must be satisfied for the rule action(s) to be performed by selecting ‘any’ or ‘all’ from the dropdown in the header bar of the conditions list. A ‘nested’ set of conditions can be added by clicking an ‘Add Nested Rule’ button, which is useful for complicated sets of conditions. For instance, if a condition set required either Condition A be satisfied or both Condition B and C be satisfied, a nested rule must be created for Condition B and C.
Testable Conditions
The following is a list of currently available conditions
Total Volume – this condition will check whether the total sales volume of the merchant from the uploaded commission data matches your specified criteria.
Commission Bucket Amount – this will check whether the total amount to be distributed among payees matches your specified criteria. The ‘commission bucket’ is the net amount due to the MSP after exemptions, processor costs, or other exceptions
Number of Transactions – checks whether the total number of merchant transactions from the uploaded commission data matches your specified criteria.
Payee Starting Date – this will check the payee’s starting date against a specific calendar date according to your specified criteria
Days/Months/Years Since Payee Starting Date – these conditions are useful for checking whether the duration of a payee’s employment match your specified criteria
MID – checks whether the merchant ID of the merchant on this record matches or does not match a specified MID
Total MID’s By Rep – use this condition to check whether the amount of merchants for which this payee is a salesperson matches your criteria
Entity – Check whether the entity matches your criteria
Number of Debit Transactions– checks whether the total number of debit transactions for the merchant from the uploaded commission data matches your specified criteria.
Elavon Status – check whether the Elavon status matches your criteria (as the name suggests, this condition will be ineffectual on non-Elavon commission batches)
Payee paid on Gross – checks whether the payee is set to be paid on gross in the commission assignment
Payee Commission Amount – this condition tests whether the amount that the payee is set to receive on this transaction based on their percentage of BP payout from the commission assignment matches you criteria
Payee Division – selecting this option displays a dropdown of available divisions. This condition checks to see whether the payee division matches your criteria
Commission Batch – allows you to select a specific month and year as your criteria. This could be useful for setting up future one-off rules to be processed on a certain batch number.
Payee Type – checks whether the payee is a referral source or a salesperson
Payee – selecting this will display a searchable text field for any salesperson or referral source in your system, and the condition checks whether the transaction matches or does not match this salesteam
Payee on Commission Assignment– selecting this will display a searchable text field for any salesperson or referral source in your system, and the condition checks to see if the specified salesteam exists on the commission assignment. Note that if Rep A and Rep B share a commission assignment and you set 'Rep B’ as criteria on this condition, Rep A will satisfy the condition but Rep B will not.
Rule Actions
Rule actions are customizable operations that will be performed on a commission transaction if a specified rule condition or set of rule conditions is satisfied. Add or remove actions by clicking the ‘Add Action’ or ‘Remove Action’ button next to any action. The order of actions can be important because they will be processed in the order in which they appear. For instance if you specify a ‘Static Modifier’ action (see below) of -$15.00, and then an ‘Add Amount per Transaction’ action which ends up totaling to $20.00, if this rule’s conditions are satisfied the payee will receive a static modifier of $5.00. There are two unofficial categories of actions: ‘dynamic’ actions will directly modify the calculated amount of the commission transaction, either by altering the payee’s commission percentage, the commission bucket amount, or by some other means. ‘Static’ actions will add or subtract an amount from the payee’s commission amount after the calculation. As an example, a rule can have two actions – one of which is ‘Flat Payee Total’ set to zero (which is a dynamic action), and one which is ‘Add Amount Per Transaction’ set to five cents. The payee’s payee amount will be calculated to zero based on the dynamic action, and then five cents per transaction will be added to this based on the static action. For more details on how individual actions behave, see the list below.
Actions
The following is a list of currently available actions:
Static Actions (added to payee total after calculation)
Add Amount Per Debit Transaction – the specified amount will be multiplied by the number of merchant debit transactions from the uploaded commission file, then added to the payee’s calculated total
Add Amount Per Transaction– the specified amount will be multiplied by the total number of merchant transactions from the uploaded commission file, then added to the payee’s calculated total
Static Modifier- the specified amount will be directly added to the payee total after calculation
Add Basis Points - Add or deduct BP from the calculated payee commissions
Add Basis Points to Bucket - Add or deduct BP from the bucket amount that commissions are calculated from.
Dynamic Actions (affect the actual commission calculation)
Balloon Payee Percentage – this is probably the most complicated rule action. This will proportionately expand or contract the payee’s commission percentage so that the combined payees in the commission assignment receive the specified percentage of the commission bucket. As an example, if Rep A receives 10% and Rep B received 5% - they will together receive 15% of the commission bucket. If a rule is applied which ‘balloons’ to 100% of the commission bucket, Rep A will now receive 66.6% of the bucket and Rep B will now receive 33.3% of the bucket.
Flat Payee Total – the payee will receive this amount as a result of the calculation regardless of their commission percentage or BP payout (if this action is coupled with a ‘Static Modifier’ action, the payee will receive this flat payee total PLUS the amount of the static modifier)
Modify Commission Bucket – the payee will receive their regular commission percentage of this specified amount instead of the commission bucket
Modify Commission Bucket (%) - the commission bucket will be modified by this percentage before payees receive their percentage of it
Modify Payee Percentage – the payee will receive this specified percentage of the commission bucket instead of their regular percentage as specified in the commission assignment
Processing Rules
A fourth step has been added to the commission runner interface for processing commission rules. Now, once you’ve clicked ‘Calculate Commissions’ and this process has finished, you have the option of skipping straight to the import screen and importing the batch into the master ‘as-is’, or clicking ‘Process Commission Rules’ to apply your rule sets and then importing.
Once rules have been processed, a status bar will appear displaying the results of the rules, including how many rules were processed, how many commission transactions were affected, and what the net total of modifications was. You can click ‘details’ next to the number of rules processed to see a popup of which rules were run, or you can click ‘details’ next to the number of affected transactions to see a full list of the transactions which were affected- with a collapsible list of the rules that affected any given transaction available by clicking ‘View’ next to the transaction.