Draw-Against-Commission Tracker

The problem this kills

Reps on a guaranteed draw are a quiet time bomb in the comp spreadsheet. You pay the draw to keep a new hire or a seasonal rep afloat, then each period you're supposed to net their earned commission against what you advanced — and track the leftover they still owe back. Get it wrong and one of two bad things happens: a rep coasts on draw for months and is blindsided the day it stops, or finance quietly writes off a recoverable balance nobody signed off on.

The math is sneaky because balances carry across periods. This month's shortfall stacks onto last month's, then a big month pays some of it down — and the running balance is buried in a tab nobody fully trusts. Add recoverable-vs-non-recoverable terms, a draw that can't legally push net pay below minimum wage, and write-offs on termination, and you've got real money and real morale riding on the most fragile tool in the building.

What you'll build

A small web app — built for the way your team actually runs draws — that does the carry-forward math correctly and shows each rep exactly where they stand:

• Set up each rep's draw terms: amount, recoverable vs non-recoverable, and the draw period.
• Import earned commission per period from a comp export or a plain CSV (rep, period, earned).
• Net earned against the draw and compute the payout, the recovery applied this period, and the new recoverable balance.
• Carry the recoverable balance forward so this period starts from last period's running position — the part spreadsheets get wrong.
• Show each rep their running position so the day the draw stops is never a surprise.
• Route each period's reconciliation for finance approval, flag anything that would push net pay below legal minimums, and require sign-off for any balance write-off.
• Export a payroll-ready payout CSV and email each rep a balance statement.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code. It builds the whole tool step by step, and it opens by interviewing you about your business — your current process, your comp and payroll systems, the real field names in your commission export, your typical and peak rep counts, your draw terms and recovery rules, and the messy edge cases like terminations and minimum-wage floors. It reads back a short tailored spec, you give a thumbs-up, and only then does it build. You get a tool shaped around your draw program, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find: the discovery interview, the data model tuned to your answers, the netting-and-carry-forward engine with fully transparent math, the finance approval gate (with a separate sign-off for write-offs), the legal-minimum flag, the payroll CSV export, the per-rep balance statements, and a "How to know it works" verification checklist. There's also a No-API fallback so you can build the entire thing today off a commission CSV — no comp-system integration required.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a spreadsheet with a fresh coat of paint. The plan bakes in the controls finance actually needs:

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own reps, draws, and balances.
• A complete audit trail — who set up the draw, who imported earnings, who approved the period, who signed off a write-off, and exactly when.
• A hard human approval gate before any payout is finalized: the tool drafts the draw-vs-earned reconciliation and recovery amounts, finance reviews and approves, and only then is the period committed and exported. Balance write-offs require their own separate sign-off.
• Duplicate guards keyed on rep + period, so the same earnings can never be processed twice.

Who it's for

Sales finance and comp admins who manage reps on draw — common for new hires ramping to quota and for seasonal roles. If you've ever tried to reconstruct a rep's running draw balance from a spreadsheet, or had to explain to a rep why their first commission-only check was so small, this is for you. No coding experience needed — you'll describe how your draws work, and the AI builds the tool.

You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your business.