Advanced sales commission reports for Service Titan

So many moving parts involved in paying staff commissions, so difficult to track the numbers! This makes it harder to get the insights you need to make the right decisions at the right time too :(

We examine how ServiceTitan sets you up to track the numbers that matter, and then we offer some advanced reporting solutions to enhance your capabilities.

The importance of tracking commission

You’d probably tell us your first priority in tracking and reporting on payroll and sales commissions is having a robust commission management capability. Without it you’re left with critical information gaps in your growth planning, trying to enhance your team’s sales performance with one hand tied behind your back. Traditionally a simple accounting admin task, the function of tracking payroll and sales commissions has become more complex for field and home services, but it also has greater value.

1. It’s a way to drive productivity and revenue. Tying commissions to specific sales goals yields information that can motivate technicians and sales reps to sell more.
2. It promotes transparency and accountability that keep staff morale high. Visible tracking of accurate commission calculation sets up timely, fair distribution of payouts to staff.
3. It supports sales strategy optimization. By identifying trends in earned commissions, it paints a picture of individual and overall performance, and informs future planning.

It’s a function that works best and most efficiently with up-to-date and accurate sales commission data. It can be extremely frustrating and counter-productive to see your data management efforts sunk by tools and processes that produce errors and absorb more time than you can afford, especially when huge, complex calculations are involved.

As a ServiceTitan user, does your tracking and reporting capability have the flexibility to accommodate changes in commission calculations as they happen in real time? Let’s see if it ticks all your boxes.

Managing payroll and sales commissions in ServiceTitan

Commission rates connect a variety of business data sources, including your CMS, accounting software, and pricebook. To ensure all the info you need to track is available for the complex calculations, you must take care when setting up your commission earner profiles.

The ServiceTitan setup

Find your payroll settings and decide how you want to set up profiles, rules and rates.

1. Are your tech profiles complete? Go from settings to people to technicians. Enter the commission rate, the sold-by commission rate, hourly rate, overtime setting, first drive settings, range bonuses, etc.
2. Does your ServiceTitan Pricebook setup correspond correctly? Enter the sold hours for service/equipment installation, spiffs in flat dollar amount or percentage, commission payable for a pricebook item, any deductions on material or other job costs before calculating the tech’s commission, etc. Enter payroll settings for bulk items by using the pricebook XLSX template, including service items, materials, and equipment, indicating where commissions are payable.
3. Need a separate payroll setup for business units? Go from settings to operations to business units. Enter business unit fees as charged to the technician, deducted from the tech’s commission, and markup on job costs as charged to the tech and not the customer.

With your profiles in play, the metrics available for tracking will generate insights that help you make those important follow-up decisions. Now, let’s see how far ServiceTitan’s native reporting capabilities go…

What you can report on in ServiceTitan

Inside your account, you can track commissions in three ways - the trick is to ensure that invoices are posted to be included in commission reporting:

1. Task Code level tracking is based on tasks associated with the specific accounts for which you’ve booked sales calls.
2. Configurable Payroll enables the setup of profiles with specific rules per job type or task-based commission with Pricebook items marked as commissionable.
3. Custom reports can be used to isolate information and create imported payroll adjustments to allocate commissions to specific individuals.

Commission calculation hiccups

It’s worth noting the feedback from members of the ServiceTitan community on how they use the system to work with commissions. One user pointed out the inability to compare what was received against what was expected, casting doubt that dues are being paid correctly.

The metrics involved play a decisive role. Product cost and individual performance metrics are some of the internal metrics impacting on commission calculations. On product costs, there’s a direct correlation between pricing data for a product and the accuracy of real-time commission calculation. This should red flag any ServiceTitan Pricebook data that requires manual updating to match what was actually paid for a product versus the cost price at time of quoting.

Of course if you’d rather not spend your valuable time doing that, a fully dynamic pricebook would make your life infinitely better and give you one less thing to worry about.

Other niggles to watch out for:

1. A ServiceTitan user noted that some jobs were omitted from a report run during a particular payroll week. It turned out the reporting date range on a configurable payroll profile was based on invoice date rather than completed date. This became problematic each time the invoice date had to change, which you’ll know can happen frequently.
2. ServiceTitan’s dashboard displays sold estimates from technicians only, and not from office staff.
3. Purchase orders (POs) attach to requisitions and projects rather than to the jobs where work was being done.
4. POs are tracked as the cost at the time of ordering rather than the received cost and quantity entered on the receiving end. In this instance, the user had to add the correct costs manually to override the materials and equipment costs on the invoice, which skewed their profit margins. But even this action didn’t recalculate the commission rate.

And the need for manual fixes linger on...

You’ll be able find some workarounds, for sure, many of which are manual. As anyone tasked with data analytics is well aware though, manual inputs risk introducing errors into calculation, an unsustainable, expensive risk in the long run.

There's a far less frustrating alternative in data automation, visualization, and advanced reporting on commissions with benefits no business should have to go without.

Advanced reporting in Wink to the rescue!

Accuracy is fundamental to effective tracking and reporting on commissions. Real-time analytics are your shortest, fastest route. In its partnership with ServiceTitan, Wink Reports can help you get real-time insights on key metrics and equip you with advanced reporting capabilities.

It helps that Wink also integrates with other software tools. It automatically pulls through relevant data from your existing systems. And, building on ServiceTitan's tracking capabilities, we offer three on-point reports to enhance your payroll and sales commission reporting:

1. Payroll jobs report

This provides an overview of all jobs included in the payroll period, broken down by technician. You get friendly warnings on the report to check certain details in ServiceTitan before proceeding, such as the default commission split setting. The report breaks down the jobs included along with job subtotals, costs, returns, and net sales volumes. It calculates commission rates based on your business rules.

2. Payroll report

This is a summarized version of the payroll jobs report with an overview of the total commission payment for the payroll period in question. You've got the option to report on the pay period of your choosing, by week or more. The breakdown itemizes each technician and the type of commission allocated to them as single, split, or handoff percentage.

3. Payroll export report

Here you can create a printable or shareable report to send to individual techs, showing the commission due to them for the pay period. Choose to export the report directly from Wink to Excel, then print a PDF per tech per page, or set up an automated schedule to email individual reports to each tech.

Bonus feature! Wink’s update payroll automation feature retrieves payroll data directly out of your ServiceTitan account, ensuring that the information is up to date for accurate reporting for the period or date range you’re analyzing. 

Sign up and connect your ServiceTitan account to Wink. But only if you want to enhance your ability to track and accurately report on your payroll and sales commission data in real time ;)