Would You Save Big by Switching to
Sales Compensation Software?
We all know it is a bad idea to delay your growth-oriented business activities. However, your organization may have willingly chosen to make this tradeoff because you already have Excel. You may assume that using a “free” (already paid for) tool will be more cost effective than making an investment into dedicated sales compensation software.
But is Excel really “free” to use… or is the old saying true that “there is no such thing as a free lunch software?”
The 4 Reasons Why Sales Compensation Software Is More Cost Effective Than Excel
A recent New York Times bestseller on time management states that whether we spend minutes or hours focused on completing a task, we are always making a tradeoff. We are missing out on every other thing we could be doing during that time.
When you spend 1 hour windsurfing, this built-in time tradeoff doesn’t feel so bad. When you spend 1 hour (or 204) manually entering data into an Excel spreadsheet and delaying your key business-driving initiatives yet again, that time tradeoff becomes painful.
Here are the 4 top tradeoffs that prove sales commission management software is better for your business than Excel.
1. Excel Can Introduce Risk for Your Financial Data
Excel files can end up anywhere: on your employee’s phones, tablets, or laptops; stored in consumer-grade cloud storage solutions like Dropbox; and in email. Theft, hacking, and simple user error can expose your Excel spreadsheets with commissions calculations. This also exposes your ERP financial data that your team copied and pasted into spreadsheets, which can lead to costly data breaches.
Dedicated sales compensation software seamlessly integrates into your ERP data, which eliminates copy/pasting into unsecured Excel files and keeps your financial data safely under your control.
2. Excel Manual Data Entry Steals Time from Your Real Business Work
Salespeople and their supervisors need timely access to up-to-date commissions data, so they know where they stand with incentives and quotas. However, you probably do not want to share every detail of your commissions calculation spreadsheet with every sales team member. This means you need to manually copy and paste the relevant reporting data into separate emails for each separate team member, which is a waste of your time.
3. Excel Can Reduce Your Insight & Impact Employee Trust
Many transaction data adjustments impact sales commissions. It is a hassle for you to manually copy/paste ERP data into Excel so you can maintain accurate, up-to-date commission records. Plus, even one data-entry mistake can make your salespeople suspicious about their earnings.
In a dedicated sales compensation software solution like Commission Plan for Microsoft Dynamics GP, commissions data stays with transaction data. This allows you to perform an integrated inquiry of sales and commission data and maintains full transparency for your sales team automatically.
4. Excel Makes Your Team Do Most of the Heavy Lifting
Mass updates are every accountant’s nightmare when it comes to commissions calculations. Even the smallest update can leave your Accounts Payable team asking, “How many cells in how many spreadsheets on how many tabs will we need to find and change before payroll?” Finding all those areas is a serious burden and Excel cannot handle the heavy lifting for you.
Using commissions management software relieves your team of the burdens of data management, making it fast and easy to perform mass updates once and have them trickle through to all relevant areas immediately. This results in better agility, more time for your AP department, and more accurate commissions data all the time.
Here’s One Way Excel CAN Help You with Commissions
Fortunately, there is one way that Excel can help you with your sales commissions. You can use it to run the numbersand objectively determine how much time and money your company would save if you made the switch to sales compensation software within the next three months.
Don’t accept tradeoffs for your company’s time, and don’t make any decisions without the data to back them up. Fire up Excel today to enter in your numbers and you will likely find that when you add up your risk, wasted time, high turnover, and extra work, you will instantly see the tradeoffs you have been making that you didn’t even know about.
Contact EthoTech for your solution.
Since 2002, companies across every sector have relied on EthoTech for the right tool for tracking, calculating, and paying variable compensation. We provide solutions, integration, and support that is focused solely on integrated variable compensation software for Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It’s all we do, and we do it better than anyone.