[OFBiz] Users - calculating, tracking, and reporting sales commission

[Si Chen]

Lee,

I'll take a shot at answering your question. Most of the functionality 
would have to be built, but it is not very difficult. I think OFBiz is 
well suited for this:
1. Most if not all of the data modeling for salesperson/customer 
relationships should be in place. You might want to look at the data 
models to see what other entities would be required to track commissions.
2. You can write a service for whatever commission structure you need.
3. You can mount the commission calculation and payment services against 
the payment of invoices or issuance of shipments using secas very easily.

I'm not sure you can use the promotions systems, though. Promotions 
would affect the ultimate value of the order to the customer. I think 
commissions would be separate from that? It could be pretty complicated 
to adapt that code.

Commissions are highly customized by company. It may not be worthwhile 
to write a big rules-based service to handle all the possible cases. 
Maybe just leave a hook for it, and the specific company can write 
whatever commission structure they need.

I'm not sure if the commissions reporting stuff should go in orders or 
HR. Part of it could certainly fit into my b2b specialized app ("salesrep").

I'm curious what others think. Good luck with it.

Si


Lee Mewshaw wrote:

> Is OFBiz well suited to calculate, track, and report sales commissions?
>
> The scenario is sales people entering orders need some mechanism for 
> calculating and reporting sales commissions. Some sales people are 
> straight salary (zero commission), others are on a mix (salary plus 
> small commission), and still others work all commission with no fixed 
> salary. In mast cases, there would we a % of the sale (not including 
> taxes) that would be used to calculate the commission on the order 
> (commission is calculated as 6% of total sale value). Sales promotions 
> might provide a kicker (sell gadgets today and get an extra 2%). In 
> other cases, there might be a fixed bonus (sell 10 widgets in a week 
> and get a $50 bonus)
>
> My thinking is that it’s very similar to the way the ecommerce 
> promotions system works, except the rules would be applied based on 
> the commission rules that apply to the agent as well as the product. 
> Playing around with it on the ecommerce site with widgets/gadgets, I 
> thought I could do it via the existing promotions system and make them 
> not visible to the user using the Y/N flag, but it’s looking like it 
> may not be possible due to the requirement that different sales people 
> may be on different plans (some salary, some commission, etc).
>
> I mentioned tracking and reporting in the subject line since the 
> salespeople are interested in viewing their own commission reports. 
> The idea would be to enter several orders, then pull up a commission 
> summary page that would show today, this week, this month, etc tabs. 
> Ideally, a supervisor could view a team of people and their 
> performance as well. Eventually the report has to be in an exportable 
> format to go to payroll. Would this be a mod to the orders section? 
> I’m still getting used to OFBiz so I’m not sure where this idea fits 
> into the architecture.
>
> Lee
>
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