Sales Commission with Accelerator?

[emacd33]

Has anyone here successfully created a sales commission plan with an accelerator?  For the last couple years I've been using a custom calculation property in deals to calculate commission at a flat rate.

Recently we've added an accelerated component which I'm finding much more difficult to create in Hubspot.  There are now three tiers of commission rates and moving from one tier to the next needs to take into account the total amount of closed deals for the year for the sales rep.  To complicate it further this could potentially mean a single deal falls into two tiers.

I've a couple post mentioning Operations Hub but we do not have that (and will not have any time soon!). Just curious if anyone has successfully figured this out!

[RubenBurdin]

Hi @emacd33  yep, this is one of those places where HubSpot is great for simple deal level math, but gets tricky as soon as you need “running totals” and tier logic.

Without Ops Hub custom code, you basically have two realistic paths. The cleanest is to treat commission as a reporting output, not a deal property. In 2025, the Custom Report Builder with formula fields is the closest thing HubSpot has to “commission logic” because you can calculate per owner and per time period in the report layer, even if you can’t perfectly persist it back on the deal.

Karsten’s approach is the one I’ve seen work in the wild: build a report grouped by Deal owner and Close date (year), then use an IF style formula to apply tiers off aggregated closed won amount. HubSpot’s formula field doc is here (https://knowledge.hubspot.com/reports/create-formula-fields-in-the-custom-report-builder )

Where it breaks, like you mentioned, is the “one deal spans two tiers” scenario. If your accelerators apply to cumulative attainment and a single deal can cross a threshold mid deal, then you need a way to know “attainment before this deal” vs “after this deal.” HubSpot reports don’t have a true running total per rep ordered by close date, so you can’t natively split a single deal into two commission rates in a deterministic way.

If you can simplify the business rule slightly, a practical compromise is: apply the tier based on the rep’s attainment before the deal is closed (or based on the tier at time of close), so each deal maps to one tier. Then you can do it with report formulas plus a couple helper properties (close year, owner, amount).

If finance needs exact split tier math per deal, Karsten’s second point is right: you’re in custom object or Ops

Hub territory. With no Ops Hub, I’d push to keep it as a commission report and align on a “single tier per deal” rule if you can. Hope this helps, and curious: do you truly need the commission stored on each deal, or is a rep-year commission report acceptable for payroll?

[emacd33]

Thanks for the thorough answer Ruben @RubenBurdin.  To you question - since our commission is paid out monthly it is helpful to split it by deal to make sure the right deals are being paid on (in addition to the tiers we also have different rates for new, renewal, expansion etc).  I do also have a roll up numbers for anyone who doesn't care to see deal level info but I (and my sales reps) sometimes like to see the more detailed list.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @emacd33,

Have you considered using formula fields in reports for this? https://knowledge.hubspot.com/reports/create-formula-fields-in-the-custom-report-builder

You would move away from displaying the commission on the deal and creating a formula that shows the aggregated (summed up) commission per deal owner in a report, using an if statement (e.g. if total closed deal amount is less than X, apply Y %, if total closed deal amount is greater than X, apply Y % on X and Z % on everything on top of that etc).

If it must be on the deal level itself, I don't see a way to do this without either a custom object that keeps track of the commission of a sales rep per year or custom code in Operations Hub Professional or Enterprise.

The custom object route would involve creating a record, associating it to all deals by the rep in a year (ideally via workflow), then rolling up closed amount so far - so that a deal commission calculation could take into account this total. (It would involve some tinkering.)

Best regards!

[emacd33]

Thank you Karsten -  Your answer makes sense.  I think we'll keep things the way they are for now and just work around but keep this in mind for the next fiscal year.  Thank you!