Tell your reps what they earn without telling them your margin

This started life as a laminated sheet: colours down the side, system sizes across the top, a payout in every cell. A rep pitched, and if the customer said yes they phoned in a colour and a size. The owner knew the price that implied. The rep knew their commission. The price per watt and the redline never entered the conversation, which is exactly why the card could be handed out at all.

That property is now structural rather than a matter of discipline. The rep-facing view is built from totals and is never handed the per-unit rates that produced them, so a screen cannot leak the cost basis by accident — it was never given it.

Reps stop needing to understand a redline. They need to understand a colour.

To you and your admins it is the obfuscation table — named for what it does, because whoever configures it has to understand that its job is to withhold your redline from the people it is handed to. A tool whose purpose is hidden from its own operator is a tool that gets misconfigured.

To the staff it is issued to it is their commission chart, which is what it honestly is to them: the chart of what they earn. Announcing the withholding on a rep's own screen would be both worse for them and self-defeating.

Neither name is a lie. They are the same table described from its two ends, and which one you see follows from where you stand — the server decides it, not the page, so the admin word cannot drift onto a rep's screen.

A band is a rate, and the grid is drawn from it. Adding a size is one edit rather than six; adding a colour is one rather than nine. Every one of those hand edits would have been a chance to mistype a number somebody is paid from.

Cards that genuinely are not linear — a bonus at the top size, a haircut at the smallest — can override individual cells. Most do not need to.

Amounts are integer cents, and rounding happens in exactly one place, so the calculator a rep uses in a driveway and the payslip they get a fortnight later cannot disagree by a cent.

A rep who generated the lead and closed it can earn a multiplier on the same card — often double. It applies only when they hold the certification your organisation requires for it, and that certification is checked against what they have actually completed rather than a box they ticked.

Doubling a payout is the single most attractive thing on a card like this to claim falsely, so it is refused without the credential rather than trusted and audited later.

When it does not apply, the screen says which reason: the lead was handed to them, or the certification is not on file. The second one is fixable, and a silently halved payout is a support ticket.

Rate cards sit alongside threshold ladders — "0–9 deals at 8%, 10–19 at 10%, 20 and up at 12%" — so a rep can earn from the card on every sale and from the ladder on their month.

Ladders run in two modes, and your organisation picks. Marginal pays each deal at the tier its own position falls in, like tax brackets. Retroactive lifts the whole period when a threshold is crossed — hit ten and all ten pay the higher rate — which is the classic accelerator.

Because the earnings ledger is append-only, a retroactive ladder never rewrites what was already booked. Crossing a threshold books the catch-up.