SPIFF & Contest Tracker: Turn Sales Promos into Clean, Approved Payouts

The problem this kills

A SPIFF is supposed to be fun. You announce it on Monday — "sell five units of the new model this week, earn $50 each" — the floor lights up, and everyone chases the prize. Then Friday comes, and you become an accountant.

You're back in a hastily built spreadsheet, copy-pasting sales, trying to remember whether that big deal counts, manually backing out the one that got returned, squinting at who hit the threshold, breaking a tie between two reps who both sold seven, and praying you didn't pay the same sale twice because it also qualified for last week's contest. One fat-fingered cell and you've either underpaid a top performer (morale killer) or overpaid the wrong person (payout headache you can't claw back).

The promo was a one-afternoon idea. The reconciliation eats your whole Friday, every single time. You don't need to live like this, and you don't need to be a developer to fix it.

What you'll build

A small, private web app for your team that runs the whole SPIFF and contest cycle:

• Define a contest or SPIFF — qualifying products, the time window, and how it pays (per qualifying unit, or by rank: 1st/2nd/3rd).
• Import qualifying sales from a CSV or Google Sheet (no integration needed).
• A live leaderboard that scores every rep against the rules in real time.
• Automatic payout math that handles the messy parts: returns that disqualify a sale, minimum thresholds before anyone earns, and tie-breaking by your chosen rule.
• A manager approval gate — the sales manager reviews the final standings, computed spiffs, and any disqualifications, and approves before anything is treated as payable.
• A clean payout CSV in the exact columns your payroll or commissions system expects, plus a winner announcement email sent through Resend.

It runs on the same modern, free-tier stack thousands of real apps use, and the whole thing is realistic to build in an afternoon.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (like Claude Code). It walks the agent through building the tool step by step, and every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt.

It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before any code is written, the plan makes the agent ask about how you actually run promos: what your sales data looks like, how you name products and reps, your real qualification rules, how you break ties, and the weird edge cases that bit you last time. Then it reflects a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up. The result is a tool shaped around your contests — not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

From there it covers the data model, the import, the leaderboard and scoring engine, the payout computation, the approval gate, the CSV export, and the announcement email — with a verification checklist so you know it actually works.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a throwaway spreadsheet. The plan bakes in real controls from the start:

• Login, so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security, so people only ever see their own organization's contests and data.
• A complete audit trail — who imported what, who scored, who approved, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate — the AI computes the standings and payouts, but a person reviews and approves before anything is treated as payable.
• Duplicate guards — one sale can't double-count across overlapping contests unless you intend it, and re-importing the same file won't pay anyone twice (dedupe key: contest + rep + sale).

Who it's for

Sales managers and operations people who run frequent SPIFFs and contests and currently track them in a throwaway spreadsheet that gets rebuilt — and re-broken — every promo. If you've ever lost a Friday reconciling a "quick" sales contest, this is for you.

You've got this. Make a folder, start your agent, and paste the first prompt.