Commission Plan Cost Calculator

Five per cent above two hundred thousand, eight above three hundred and twenty. On sales of three hundred and eighty thousand that is ten thousand eight hundred.

Six per cent of everything above the threshold — which is neither of the rates on the plan document.

But the figure that changes behaviour is not the average rate at all. It is the marginal one: what the NEXT sale earns. Above the second threshold that is eighty pounds a thousand, between the thresholds it is fifty, and below the first threshold it is nothing.

Nothing. Not a low rate — zero. Somebody who cannot realistically reach the threshold this period is being paid nothing extra for anything they sell, which is the exact opposite of what a commission plan is for.

And it gets worse, because the rational response to that is to hold work back until the next period, where it counts towards a threshold that can actually be reached. The plan is buying that behaviour whether or not anybody intended it, and the page prices it so you can see how many people are sitting in that zone.

The table runs the same plan across every level of sales — just under each threshold, just over, and where your people actually are — so three people on one plan stop looking like one incentive and start looking like three.

What the plan CAUSES is not on this page and cannot be. Whether an accelerator produces sales that would not otherwise have happened is unknowable from a payroll: the ones that would have come anyway look identical to the ones it bought. This prices the plan rather than crediting it.

If there is no accelerator, set the two rates the same. The arithmetic still works and the dead zone below the first threshold is still there, which is usually the thing worth seeing.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. The same plan reads completely differently to somebody at a hundred and fifty thousand and somebody at three hundred and eighty.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.