Recompute

What is a recompute?

A recompute re-runs a commission calculation for a period that has already been calculated, because something underneath it changed: a deal value was corrected, a late deal arrived, a credit was reassigned, or the plan itself was amended.

The important property is that a recompute recalculates from the source. It does not patch the payout figure; it applies the plan again, to the corrected data, and produces a new result. Everything downstream moves with it: attainment, tier placement, accelerator eligibility, and therefore the rate that applied to every other deal in the period.

That is what separates it from a commission adjustment, which overrides the output and leaves the calculation itself untouched.

Eligible amount vs earned amount

Recompute is the mechanic behind a question that comes up constantly and confuses almost everyone who meets it for the first time: why is the earned amount different from the eligible amount?

These are two different numbers and they are supposed to differ.

Eligible amountEarned amountWhat it isWhat the deal could pay under the planWhat the rep is actually credited with after all rules applyReflectsThe rate applied to the dealThe rate, plus splits, thresholds, caps, holdbacks, and adjustmentsChanges whenThe deal value or rate changesAny of the above changes, or a recompute is runTypical relationshipThe starting pointUsually lower, and it should be explainable

A deal might be eligible for $4,000 of commission, and the rep earns $2,000, because a 50/50 split applied. Or a deal is eligible for $4,000 and earns nothing, because the rep had not yet crossed the plan's threshold when it closed. Neither is an error. Both are the plan working.

The confusion arises when the two numbers move after the rep has already seen them, which is precisely what a recompute does. The rep saw $4,000 last week and sees $3,200 today, and nobody told them why. That is not a calculation problem. It is a communication problem, and it is the reason recompute needs to be defined rather than performed silently.

What triggers a recompute

TriggerWhat changedWhat movesLate deal arrivesA deal closed inside the period but synced after calculation.Attainment rises, which may move the rep into a higher tier on every deal.Deal value correctedThe booking was $50,000, the signed order form said $48,000.That deal's commission, and possibly the whole period's tier placement.Credit reassignedThe wrong rep was credited, or a split changed.Both reps' attainment and payouts.Plan amendedA rate or threshold was changed and applied retroactively.Potentially every deal in the period.Clawback appliedA prior-period deal cancelled.The current period, and possibly a carryover balance.

Row one is the one people underestimate. A single late deal does not simply add its own commission. If it pushes the rep from 98% to 104% of quota, and the plan has an accelerator at 100%, then every deal above the threshold reprices. A recompute is not additive; it is a re-run, and the result can move by far more than the value of the thing that triggered it.

What this means?

For RevOps, the discipline is to recompute rather than adjust whenever the input was wrong. Patching the payout with an adjustment fixes the money and leaves the attainment wrong, and wrong attainment follows a rep through the rest of the year, quietly placing them in the wrong tier.

For the rep, the thing that makes recompute tolerable is warning. A number that changes without explanation destroys trust in the whole statement, even when the new number is more correct than the old one. Reps do not object to being recomputed. They object to discovering it.

For Finance, every recompute must be recorded. A period that has been recalculated is a period whose previously reported figures no longer hold, and if that is not in the audit trail, the accrual and the final payout will disagree with nothing to explain the gap.

How Visdum handles recompute

Recompute is a first-class operation in Visdum rather than a rebuild. When data is corrected or a plan is amended, the period is recalculated from source, so attainment, tier placement, and every dependent payout are updated together rather than patched individually.

Both the eligible and the earned amount are visible on the rep's statement, with the rules that produced the difference, so the question of why they differ is answered on the page rather than in a meeting. Every recompute is written to the audit trail with what changed and when, so a figure that moved after the rep first saw it can be explained, and a period that was recalculated after Finance accrued against it does not become an unexplained variance at close.

Take a self-guided product tour to see this in action, or read the complete commission close playbook.

Related terms

Commission Adjustment · Commission True-Up · Carryover · Quota Attainment · Commission Audit Trail