Most of what we build is for insurance. But commission isn’t an insurance problem; it’s a problem anywhere people are paid on results. The clearest proof we have is a medical device sales company whose commission process had outgrown the way it was run: spreadsheets, manual checks and a team stretched thinner every quarter.
Paid when it’s used, not when it ships
The company sold two ways. Some devices were sold directly and invoiced like any other order. Others went out on consignment: stocked on a hospital’s shelf and only paid for once a medical professional took one off that shelf, sometimes months later.
Commission had to follow the money. A rep could place inventory in January and not earn on it until the invoice was paid in full in June. Years of sales meant years of invoices in different states, and the team was triple-checking paid-in-full statuses by hand before anyone got paid.
On top of the timing, the company had a lot of complex sales agreements with its reps. Every rep’s terms were their own, and keeping each agreement straight while waiting on payments is exactly the kind of work that ends up living in one person’s head.
| Date | Event | Commission released |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 12 | Device placed on consignment at a hospital | $0.00 |
| Apr 3 | Used in a procedure; invoice issued for $18,000 | $0.00 |
| Jun 18 | Invoice paid in full | $1,440.00 |
The work scaled. The team didn’t.
As the company grew, so did the manual work: hundreds of open invoices, payments that didn’t always arrive on time, and reps asking what they were owed. The team’s bandwidth didn’t grow with them.
Making customers pay faster wasn’t the answer. That deferment is part of how the business works, and for a lot of companies it’s how they stay in the black. The commission system had to live with it, not fight it.
Finding a common parent
We handled the ETL for their whole inventory and sales lifecycle, pulling years of history out of their inventory management system. Then we mapped each part of a sale onto something our engine already understood from insurance.
| In insurance | In device sales |
|---|---|
| Policy | Invoice |
| Coverage type | Product |
| Program | Product catalog |
| Insured | Customer |
| Producer | Sales rep |
Once an invoice is a policy and a sales rep is a producer, the engine’s rules carry over. Each rep’s agreement became a set of commission rules, the same way a producer’s agreement does in insurance, so splits, tiers, overrides and chargebacks mean what they always meant. And “payments received” or “paid in full” becomes the hinge point that releases commission, the same moment of payment that insurance already cared about.
Simple on paper, hard in practice
Written down, the mapping looks obvious. In practice, teaching a billing system in which every field always meant one thing to mean another is hard. Every report, rule and statement has assumptions baked into it.
Rebuilding a 15-year-old insurance system had taught us how to do that: find what the old structure is really for, keep it, and reshape the rest around it. We took the same approach here.
The path to CBaaS
Generalizing the engine for this company showed us it could stand on its own. If commission can follow invoices and products as easily as policies and coverages, it can sit behind any system that sends it the right events. That idea became our CBaaS API.
Where they are now
Today the company is scaling and adding new reps and agents regularly, with more than $23M in sales managed through the engine so far. The manual spreadsheets are gone, and so is most of the upkeep that came with tracking commission through a complicated inventory cycle.
If you pay people on results and the process behind it is costing you time or trust, inside insurance or out, book a call.
