Statement day
The monthly commission statement arrives from your mobile distributor as a spreadsheet with hundreds of rows. Each row is a connection, an upgrade, a migration or a clawback, identified by mobile number, a distributor reference and a tariff code. The total is lower than the sales team expected. It usually is.
Checking it properly means matching each row with a sale in your CRM, confirming the tariff and term match what was sold, and working out whether each clawback is fair. That is a day's work nobody has, so the statement gets a quick glance and the total gets accepted. The sales team are paid their own commission on what they sold, which is not the same number.
Three months later a batch of clawbacks lands for customers who downgraded or left early, and some of those customers you do not recognise at all.
Why the numbers never line up
The distributor and your business describe the same sale differently, at different times.
- The distributor identifies a connection by mobile number and its own reference; your CRM identifies it by customer and deal.
- Commission is paid when the network confirms the connection, which may be a different month from when you closed the sale.
- Rates depend on tariff, term length, and whether it is a new connection, an upgrade or a port-in, and those rules change during the year.
- Clawbacks follow customer behaviour you may not see: an early cancellation, a tariff downgrade, a number ported away inside the clawback window.
- Bulk business deals with many lines are sometimes paid line by line and sometimes as one amount.
Without a match between the two sets of records, underpayments look like normal variation and clawbacks look like bad luck.
What goes unclaimed
| Mismatch | Effect |
|---|---|
| Connection sold but not on any statement | Commission never received |
| Paid at a lower tariff band | Shortfall accepted without query |
| Clawback for a customer who did not leave | Money lost to a data error |
| Clawback risk not spotted | No chance to save the customer first |
| Sales paid on sales, business paid on connections | Your margin quietly shrinks |
Distributors generally have a window for raising queries. Once it has passed, a missing payment is usually gone. That window is the real reason checking by hand does not work: by the time someone gets to it, the deadline has moved on.
The commission reconciliation we build
- Each statement is imported in its original format, whatever columns the distributor uses, with no retyping.
- Every line is matched to a sale in your CRM by mobile number, with fallbacks on customer name and date for lines where the number changed during porting.
- The expected commission for each sale is calculated from the rate card that applied when it was sold, which you keep in a simple table your team can update.
- Differences are grouped: missing, underpaid, overpaid, and clawbacks. Each query line comes with the evidence (sale date, tariff, term) laid out ready to send to the distributor.
- Open queries are tracked against the distributor's query deadline, with a reminder before it passes.
- Connections inside a clawback window are watched. If a customer asks for a PAC or STAC code, downgrades or goes quiet on a bill, the account manager is told while there is still time to talk to them.
We also produce a sales commission report from the same matched data, so what you pay your team lines up with what you actually received.
What changes each month
Statement day becomes a short review: here is what matched, here are the lines to query, here is the evidence. Queries go out inside the window. Clawbacks stop being a surprise, because the ones you can see coming are on someone's list while the customer can still be kept.
Over a few months you also learn which tariffs and deal types reliably pay what you expect, which is useful when you decide what to push. If you ever move distributor, the history of what each one paid against what it promised is sitting in one place rather than in old statement spreadsheets.
Signs you are leaving commission behind
- The distributor's commission statement is accepted without line by line checking.
- Nobody tracks the deadline for raising commission queries.
- Clawbacks arrive for customers nobody knew were at risk.
- Sales commission and received commission are worked out separately.
- Rate cards live in an email from the distributor, not in a table.