Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

8–11. Post Commission Payments on the Company Intranet

A sales staff whose pay structure is heavily skewed in favor of commission payments, rather than salaries, will probably hound the accounting staff at month-end to see what their commission payments will be. This comes at the time of the month when the accounting staff is trying to close the accounting books, and so increases their workload at the worst possible time of the month. However, by creating a linkage between the accounting database and a company’s intranet site, it is now possible to shift this information directly to a Web page where the sales staff can view it at any time, and without involving the valuable time of the accounting staff.

There are two ways to post the commission information. One is to wait until all commission-related calculations have been completed at month-end, and then either manually dump the data into an HTML (HyperText Markup Language) format for posting to a Web page or else run a batch program that does so automatically. Either approach will give the sales staff a complete set of information about their commissions. However, this approach still requires some manual effort at month-end (even if only for a few minutes while a batch program runs).

An alternative approach is to create a direct interface between the accounting database and the Web page, so that commissions are updated constantly, including grand totals for each commission payment period. By using this approach, the accounting ...