SPIFF & Sales Contest Tracker: Run Contests People Trust, Pay Out the Right Winners

The problem this kills

A SPIFF or quarterly contest is supposed to be the easy part of sales management: pick a goal, dangle a prize, watch people chase it. In reality the close is a mess. Someone exports the quarter's deals into a spreadsheet, tries to remember which products counted, manually adds up who sold what, and then the arguments start — "that deal closed on the 31st, it counts," "but the customer refunded it last week," "you double-counted my renewal." By the time you've untangled it, the contest is over, the energy is gone, and you're hand-cutting prizes you're not totally sure are correct.

The two expensive failures are paying the wrong person and paying twice. A deal that got refunded inside the window should not crown a winner. The same qualifying record should never count toward a SPIFF twice. And reps lose all motivation when the standings only appear after the contest closes — nobody pushes harder in week six if they can't see where they stand. 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 where you:

• Define a contest once — name, window (start/end dates), eligible products or activities, how points are scored, and the prizes — and keep those rules versioned so everyone can see exactly what the contest said.
• Import the deals or activity to score against, from a CSV or Google Sheet, with a duplicate guard so the same record can't be counted twice toward the SPIFF.
• Watch a live leaderboard that ranks reps in real time while the contest is running, so the standings actually drive behavior.
• Close the window and clean up — flag and remove disqualifications (refunds, cancellations, returns inside the window) before anyone is declared a winner.
• Approve and pay out — the manager reviews the verified winners list, approves it (the human gate), and only then does the tool produce the final payout CSV and send the announcement email.

It's tailored to your contests, not a generic template — because the first thing it does is interview you about how you actually run them.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending in a ready-to-copy prompt.

It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes any code, the agent asks how you run contests today, what systems and spreadsheets your deals live in, the exact field names and product/SKU codes in your data, your typical and peak deal volumes, your precise scoring and eligibility rules, and the messy edge cases (split credit, team deals, refunds that land after the window). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you, gets your thumbs-up, and then shapes the data model and every later step around your answers. You get a tool that fits your contests — not a one-size-fits-all demo.

From there it covers the data model, the contest-rules screen with versioning, the deals importer with the dedupe key, the live leaderboard, the disqualification pass, the manager approval gate, and the CSV export plus Resend announcement.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. Every plan builds in the controls that make a tool safe to use on real money and real people:

• Login, so only your team can get in.
• Row-level security, so people only ever see their own organization's contests and data.
• A complete audit trail — who created the contest, who changed a rule, who disqualified a deal, who approved the payout, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate — the tool drafts the winners and payouts, the manager verifies eligibility and approves, and only then is anything committed.
• Duplicate guards — a dedupe key of contest + rep + qualifying record means one deal can never count twice toward a SPIFF.

Who it's for

Sales managers and sales-ops people who run quarterly SPIFFs and contests and dread the close — the verifying, the double-counting disputes, the "is this refund in or out" judgment calls. If you can write up contest rules in a doc and keep deals in a spreadsheet, you can build this.

You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.