Commission Clawback Tracker

The problem this kills

You paid the commission weeks ago. The rep closed the deal, the payout went out, everyone moved on. Then the customer refunds, cancels in the trial-out window, churns in month two, or simply never pays the invoice — and the revenue you commissioned on just evaporated. Now the company is owed money back, and tracking it down is somebody's miserable spreadsheet job.

So sales finance keeps a side ledger: paste in the refunds and cancellations, hunt for the original deal, figure out which rep got paid and how much, apply the clawback window ("we don't recover after 6 months"), apply proration ("they keep the months they earned"), and then try to net it against a future payout without anyone screaming. It's slow, it's error-prone, and the failure modes are ugly in both directions — claw back something outside the policy window and you've broken trust (and maybe the law); miss a reversal and the company quietly eats the loss. Worse, push a rep's net pay below the legal minimum to recover a clawback and you've created a compliance problem, not solved one.

This is exactly the kind of rules-heavy, high-stakes, must-be-fair calculation that a small internal tool does better than a spreadsheet — and you do not need to be a developer to build it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for sales finance. You import two files — your paid-commission history and a reversal-events feed (refunds, cancellations, early churn, non-payment). The tool matches each reversal back to the original deal it was paid on, identifies the rep and the commission amount, and computes the clawback per your policy: it honors your clawback window (no recovery after N months) and your proration rules (the rep keeps what they earned), and it values the recovery to the cent.

Then it stops. Finance reviews each computed clawback on one screen — is it inside the window, is the amount right, is this deal actually disputed? — edits or holds anything that looks wrong, and clicks Approve. Only approved recoveries get netted against the rep's next commission run. The tool refuses to push net pay below the legal minimum (it flags those for partial recovery or a payment plan instead), routes disputes back to the dispute desk, and notifies each rep with a plain-English explanation of what was clawed back and why. Finally it exports the recovery lines in the exact columns your payroll or commission system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — what triggers a clawback for you, how a reversal links back to the original deal, your exact clawback window and proration math, your commission and payroll systems, your dispute process, and your nastiest edge cases — and then tailors the data model, the policy engine, and every later step to your answers. This is a build shaped around your comp plan and your policy, not a generic template.

From there it walks the agent through the database schema, the two CSV imports with their duplicate guards, the deal-matching and clawback-computation engine (window + proration), the legal-minimum and dispute guards, the finance review-and-approve screen, the netting against the next run, the rep notification, and the export of recovery lines. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. Because the whole thing runs on CSV in and payroll-ready CSV out, you can build and use it this weekend even with no live connection to your commission or payroll system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This moves real money out of people's paychecks, so it's built like it matters: login so only your finance team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's data, and a complete audit trail of every import, match, edit, approval, and export — who did what, and when. Nothing is recovered automatically: each computed clawback is a draft until finance approves it, and approval is the hard human-in-the-loop gate before anything nets against a payout. Duplicate guards keyed on the original deal plus the reversal event mean the same reversal can't be clawed back twice. And two safety rails are built in by design: recoveries outside the clawback window are blocked, and any recovery that would drop a rep below the legal pay minimum is flagged for a human decision instead of being forced through.

Who it's for

Sales finance, comp analysts, and revenue-operations teams in SaaS, insurance, subscription, and any business where revenue can reverse after the commission is already paid. If you can explain your clawback policy in plain words, you can build the tool that enforces it fairly.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let it interview you about your comp plan.