Commission Plan Modeler: See What a New Comp Plan Costs Before You Announce It
Run a proposed commission plan against last year's closed deals to show what every rep would have earned and what it would have cost the company — then have leadership approve the adopted version before anyone hears a word.
A web tool where you import historical closed deals, define your current plan plus 2–3 proposed plans, run a what-if model, and see per-rep and total-cost outcomes side by side — then leadership approves and versions the adopted plan, and you export the plan spec and summary. It models payouts; it never pays anyone.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- A historical closed-deals CSV (rep, date, amount, product, etc.)
- Your current commission plan rules and one or more proposed plans
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Changing a commission plan is one of the highest-stakes things a sales-comp owner does, and it usually gets decided on a gut feel and a hastily-built spreadsheet. Someone proposes a new accelerator or a lower base rate, a finance partner tries to model it in Excel against a handful of "representative" reps, and everyone crosses their fingers. Then it ships — and the model was wrong.
The failure modes are brutal in both directions. Set the curve too rich and you blow the comp budget the moment a couple of reps catch fire. Set it too lean and your top performers quietly update their resumes. And because nobody ran the new plan against the actual deals reps closed last year, you don't find out which way you missed until the checks go out. You don't need to be a developer to stop guessing.
What you'll build
A simple internal web tool that does one thing well: it replays history. You import your historical closed-deal data (a CSV or Sheet of who closed what, for how much, when). You define your current plan and one or more proposed plans — rates, tiers, accelerators, caps, draws, SPIFs, whatever your business actually uses. The tool runs each plan against the same past deals and shows you, per rep and in total, what everyone would have earned and what it would have cost the company. You can line up 2–3 scenarios side by side and see the deltas: who wins, who loses, and how the total comp bill moves versus today. Leadership reviews the modeled outcomes and approves one version as adopted — and only then is it locked and versioned. The tool exports a clean plan spec and a summary you can take into the announcement meeting.
It is clearly labeled as modeling, not payout. No money moves. Nobody gets paid. It's the dress rehearsal you run before you commit.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — what your closed-deal data looks like and how its columns are named, how your current plan actually pays (rates, tiers, accelerators, caps, draws, clawbacks), what you're trying to change and why, your typical and peak deal volumes, who has to sign off on a plan change, and the messy edge cases (split deals, ramping reps, mid-period hires) — and then it tailors the data model, the plan-rules engine, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reads a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the deal import, the plan-definition builder, the modeling engine, the side-by-side scenario comparison, the leadership review-and-adopt gate, and the export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a fallback so you can build and use the whole thing today on a CSV, with no integration to your CRM or payroll system.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
Even though this tool never pays anyone, it touches sensitive earnings data and feeds a real leadership decision — so it ships with the controls a serious comp team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's reps and deals, a complete audit trail of who created which scenario, who ran which model, and who approved which plan version and when, a hard human-in-the-loop gate so a proposed plan is only marked adopted after leadership reviews the modeled cost and explicitly approves, duplicate guards so the same scenario (by name and date) can't be created twice, and full versioning so every adopted plan is preserved and you can always show exactly what was approved.
Who it's for
Sales-comp owners, sales-ops leads, and finance partners who design or revise commission plans and want to sanity-check a change against real history before it goes live. If you can explain how your current plan pays, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll watch your first what-if scenario light up the same weekend.