Payday without the spreadsheets.

The bottleneck

Payroll lived in one person's head.

Every pay period meant pulling deals out of the database and working the commission math by hand, with every rule, exception, and judgment call living in spreadsheets only one person understood. A mistake meant a rep paid wrong, and finding it meant hours of archaeology through formulas nobody else could read.

The rules themselves were genuinely complicated: different teams of reps on different commission structures, rate changes mid-period, adjustments and clawbacks, all converging on the same desk every payday. The person who ran it could never be sick, never be on vacation, and never leave.

How we did it

1. 1

   Map. We sat with the person who runs payroll and wrote down every rule, exception, and judgment call before touching a line of code: how each team's commissions compute, what happens on a canceled deal, which adjustments need a human decision. The spreadsheet logic became a written specification both sides could argue with.

2. 2

   Build. The system computes per-rep pay lines nightly, straight from the deal ledger. Every line traces back to the deals behind it, every rule lives in reviewable code instead of a formula bar, and the judgment calls that need a human still get one: the system queues them instead of guessing.

3. 3

   Verify. Before go-live, the system's numbers were validated to the penny against one region's historical payroll, period by period. Discrepancies were chased down one at a time until the two agreed, and some turned out to be errors in the old spreadsheets. Only then did it take over.

Where it stands

The math runs nightly. A human approves.

Since launch, the system has computed 194 individual rep paychecks, each one built from the same ledger the deal entered on day one. Because the math runs nightly instead of once per pay period, a wrong number surfaces days before payday, while it is still a correction instead of an apology.

Payday stopped depending on one person's spreadsheets, and the person who used to carry it reviews and approves instead of computing. A rep who questions a paycheck gets an answer traced to specific deals, not a shrug.

The company owns the whole thing in its own accounts, and the payroll rules are now written down in working code instead of living in someone's head.

Paycheck counts are read directly from the live system as of September 2026.

Your version of this bottleneck is fixable too.

Thirty minutes on your company and what you want from AI. If it's not a fit, we'll say so on the call.