Date: 8th September 2025

Are you a good SPM housekeeper?

If you take your eye off them, sales compensation plans can get messy. Replacements, additions and workarounds soon take hold, meaning your whole compensation system becomes less robust, less efficient and less trusted. The ability to change is essential – you need to evolve plans to drive the right sales behaviours as the business changes. But constant tactical tweaks and adjustments tend to lead to errors and disruption.

That’s why it’s important to engage in regular SPM housekeeping – maintaining necessary adaptations to your compensation plans and schedule with an eagle eye on unstable or poorly implemented variations that could create trouble around the corner. One of the best ways to keep your sales plans running smoothly so your SPM solution can perform optimally is to work through a systematic maintenance checklist and to stick to a regular housekeeping schedule.

Why streamlining matters

If you don’t clear up after yourself at home for one day, it causes a small mess. If you neglect clearing up for a month, it leaves you with a mammoth task. Sales compensation plans function similarly: over the course of a few months or a year, each plan may only gain a few inconsistencies, but over time, these inefficiencies add up across your entire plan portfolio.

SPM automation is a big help with preventing calculation errors, but it’s not a substitute for regular, proactive housekeeping. Duplications, compensation errors and strategy misalignments are easily solved through regular reviews. You might need to undertake a review every three months in a fast-moving SaaS or sales organisation with constantly shifting strategies, or in more stable businesses, an annual check-up may be sufficient. Reviewing your sales compensation plan twice a year is a good aim for most organisations, but you should consider and adapt this to your business and sales cadence.

Compincent’s Commissions Housekeeping Checklist

Over years of working with clients across industries to deploy and optimise SPM, we’ve come up with a regular review checklist that can help pre-empt and prevent inefficiencies and errors.

1. Simplify your plan: Are there any outdated mechanics which no longer apply? Have your business goals changed? Remove or update any plans that are no relevant, are not being used or don’t match with current processes.
2. Audit data sources: Ensure that your data sources are clean and there is no duplication of information feeding in to your calculations. Check that your fields still map correctly.
3. Check your calculation logic: Are your formulas consistent? Are they accurate? Check that everything is still valid and hasn’t been modified inaccurately
4. Review user access and approvals: Can anyone access things they shouldn’t? Make sure that everyone has the correct permissions for your compensation systems and reports.
5. Align reporting and visibility: Dashboard statements should be clear, accurate and relevant. Take a look with fresh eyes to make sure you aren’t creating confusion or seeding misunderstanding.
6. Archive old plans: Store your old data securely, removing anything redundant from your live system.
7. Collect user feedback: As users with skin in the game, your sales and compensation team will know where things don’t go smoothly. Ask reps and managers if there is anything that they can see needs fixing or improving.

Build housekeeping into your routine

Routines can be hard to form and sustain. But this checklist should be like any other business admin activity, regularly executed and habitual. Build your SPM housekeeping task into calendars, add it to your workflow and discipline yourself to ensure you don’t miss a date. We know from plenty of our own experience that frequent checkbacks will help you avoid the pain of weeding out unruly plan overgrowth in a major overhaul that’s forced on you by necessity.

The bottom line on plan maintenance

Regularly reviewing, reducing and streamlining your plans will result in fewer errors and less maintenance, giving you more opportunity to support your business goals with proactive refinements.

Do you have a structured plan review process? And do you honestly stick to it? How does your process compare to our checklist? Are there any suggestions that you could take into your business? We’d love to hear your tried and tested tips.

If you’d like to explore how a new or enhanced SPM solution can use the latest technology to make these tasks even easier, Compincent can help. Get in touch with our team to find out about SPM and Total Pay innovation and efficiency that could rapidly produce a return on investment in your unique business environment.