Struggling with Dynamics GP Variable Compensation? Here’s Why.
Microsoft Dynamics GP is a great ERP, but it does not have great built-in capabilities for calculating commissions, royalties, and rebates. The largest issue that businesses experience with Dynamics GP variable compensation calculations is that both of the built-in commission computation methods can incorrectly pay your salespeople.
Correcting Dynamics GP commission payouts creates an irritating manual-data-entry obstacle for you – but if you have even the slightest bit of variable comp complexity, that obstacle can become a disaster.
The Biggest Issue with Dynamics GP Variable Compensation Calculations
In Dynamics GP, you can calculate commissions as a percentage of:
- “Sales Dollars,” which refers to the subtotal sales amount (i.e., the sum of line items on an invoice); or
- “Total Invoice,” which includes all discounts, freight, taxes, and miscellaneous charges.
When you calculate by Sales Dollars, your salespeople will receive commission on the price of each line item, with no document-level discounts applied. When you calculate by Total Invoice, your salespeople will receive commissions on sales tax and freight. Neither of these situations is ideal. GP is inflexible in this behavior.
For example, if you want to take into account document-level discounts when calculating commissions in standard GP, you need to choose “Total Invoice” as your commission calculation method. However, then you will pay commissions on tax and freight too, since there is no way to separate these amounts from the commission calculation in GP.
Unfortunately, there are 18 additional limitations within Dynamics GP’s variable compensation capabilities (at the time of this writing).
18 Additional Limitations for Calculating Variable Comp in Dynamics GP
Aside from that #1 issue we just mentioned, the biggest problems for GP users are that you can’t split commissions, and that workarounds using Excel or a bolted-on homegrown commission solution each result in manual-data-entry errors and siloed data. It takes a significant investment of your team’s time to overcome these issues.
Here are the additional limitations within Dynamics GP’s variable comp capabilities:
- Multiple salespeople cannot get paid on an individual line item, and you cannot automatically split a commission.
- You cannot calculate or track against sales quotas, milestones, thresholds, or accelerators.
- You cannot determine commission rate based on sliding scale tiers (e.g., tier types including percentage of margin, unit price, or price level).
- You cannot use a different commission rate for different customers or items, or combinations of customers or items.
- GP does not create commission transactions in the Accounts Payable module.
- GP does not create commission transactions in the Payroll module.
- You cannot automate the email distribution of commission statements to salespeople.
- You cannot calculate or track royalties in GP.
- You cannot calculate or track customer rebates in GP.
- You cannot assign multiple salespeople to individual customers, ship-to addresses, or item combinations (and you cannot assign multiple salespeople to groups of customers, sales territories, or inventory items either).
- You cannot automate the calculation of commissions to a single salesperson multiple times for a sales document (e.g., you cannot pay them once as the sales rep and again as the sales manager).
- You cannot calculate commission based on margin (sales minus cost), or using a flat dollar amount, or using the quantity of items sold on an invoice.
- Once sales invoices are posted in GP, you cannot change the commission data.
- You cannot automatically reduce commissions in GP using markdowns, trade discounts, terms discounts, write-offs, payment terms, credit card types, or as invoices age.
- You cannot specify individual salespeople, customers, inventory items, or sales documents as non-commissionable in GP.
- You cannot assign a Salesperson Class to each Salesperson ID, and then pay commissions and generate commission reports based on a Salesperson Class range.
- Once the invoice is posted, you cannot adjust commissions in GP for scenarios such as bonuses, commission draws, chargebacks, or correcting commissions paid incorrectly in a previous period – and that means you cannot import mass commission adjustments for these items either.
- You cannot schedule rate calculation overrides in GP that use effective dates for seasonal business, promos, or discontinued products.
That’s a lot you simply cannot do with Dynamics GP commissions.
How to Overcome All 19 Limitations the Easy Way
You don’t have to change your ERP to overcome these limitations. ERP migrations are time consuming, costly, and disruptive – and there’s no guarantee that your new ERP would be any better at handling commissions than GP is!
A better, more dependable solution is to augment GP with specialized software that makes your variable compensation calculations fast and easy.
EthoTech’s variable comp software for Dynamics GP, Commission Plan, overcomes every issue on this list seamlessly because it supports intricate and highly complex calculations including quotas and tier-based sliding scales.
In other words, Commission Plan results in easy, fast commissions calculations for you – finally.
Here are a few of Commission Plan’s key capabilities that our clients especially appreciate:
- Assign different salespeople or commissions to each line on an invoice, or assign multiple salespeople to each line.
- Pay royalties by item.
- Pay different rates on different items’ pricing (e.g., you can assign a different commission rate for sales that are greater than $150.00 versus sales that are less than $150.00).
- Automate sales quota calculation differentials (e.g., if the salesperson sells more than $1 million they will earn 7.5% commissions, but if the salesperson sells less than $1 million they will earn 5% commissions).
Imagine a world in which you never waste hours on commissions calculations again. Then make that your reality.
It’s time to take back your time.
Contact the Variable Compensation Experts at EthoTech
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.
Want to know if your company would benefit from variable compensation software? We developed this simple matrix to help you discover if variable compensation software is right for your company.