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Monthly Accrual with Quarterly and Annual Bonuses

Choose this pattern when you pay monthly, but part of compensation depends on quarterly or annual attainment (bonuses, accelerators, true-ups).

Before configuring, decide what accrues monthly vs what true-ups at quarter/year end, and which deal date anchors attainment. Validate with a small set of known deals across two periods (mid-quarter and quarter close) and reconcile results in a report.

When to use this

  • You accrue commission monthly but pay larger bonuses on longer cadences.
  • You need true-ups, pooling windows, or attainment windows.
  • You want clear explanations of payout timing vs earned timing.

In Core8, the common pattern is:

  • Set the plan to payout monthly, but
  • Pool attainment over the year, and
  • Encode bonus precedence rules in the plan’s calculator (or use adjustments for edge cases).
Plan basics
Plan basics
  1. Set organization timing defaults (monthly cadence).
  2. Configure plan-level pooling/true-ups for quarter/year logic.
  3. Decide how quarterly/annual bonuses should be paid:
    • in the last month of the quarter
    • spread across the quarter
    • as a manual adjustment when needed

Step 1: Set organization timing defaults

Monthly payout is configured at the organization level (plans inherit these values).

In Settings (Organization) → Commission, set:

  • Accrual cadence: Monthly (if your calculations are monthly)
  • Payout cadence: Monthly
  • Fiscal year start month: match Finance’s fiscal calendar

Step 2: Configure plan-level pooling / true-ups

In the plan’s Advanced Settings, use:

  • Attainment pooling window: typically Annual (for YTD pooling)
  • True‑up cadence: Quarterly (if you need quarter-end adjustments/bonuses)

What “yearly attainment pooling” means

With yearly pooling, the calculator can evaluate quarter/year thresholds using the broader deal set, even if you’re saving results month-by-month.

Common gotchas

  • Decide (and document) which date anchors the behavior: booking date vs invoice date vs payment date.
  • If the pattern depends on fields from an integration, confirm those fields actually exist in Data Hub and aren’t overridden.
  • Test with a tiny set of deals first, then expand—patterns often “work” but break on edge cases like refunds, partial payments, or split deals.

How to verify

Use a report view to validate attainment totals and payout results match expectations for the month/quarter/year.

Report by rep
Report by rep

Operational guidance (common edge cases)

  • If a quarter has no eligible deal in the “bonus month”, you may need a manual adjustment to ensure the bonus is paid on time.
  • If quarterly and annual bonuses can overlap, document (and encode) an explicit precedence rule (for example: quarterly gate must be met before annual accelerators apply).