Picture this: You’ve worked all quarter tracking sales comp, managing spreadsheets and tracking your sales team’s performance. When reps have commission questions, it takes multiple calculations and several different files before you have any answers.

At quarter close, your team books a weekend to run compensation reports—a long, monotonous, and error-prone chore—and even then, reps won’t be paid for another month.

I remember spending the weekend at the office after quarter close running through spreadsheets to get all of the credits right, so that we could then run the separate comp spreadsheets.  Our calendar had the post quarter weekend blocked, and our budget even had money for the pizza.

However, stone-age spreadsheets don’t belong in the modern world—let alone your weekends. You may think that booking a weekend for work-related tasks will save you time during the week, but the effects on your team’s morale can be disastrous.

The reality is that despite the resulting dip in work-week productivity, some companies still book a weekend to run their sales comp.

You know it doesn’t work, so why do you keep doing it?

To work less and grow more, you can use incentive compensation technology to get more done during the workweek and eliminate the need for weekends spent at the office.

Just think: instead of spending quarter-end weekends crunching data, you could revisit more strategic tasks. Who wants to spend time off at the office, anyway?

Here’s what you could be doing instead:

• Enhance client relationships—Invest in market research that turns into better communication, which improves client relationships.
• Re-vamp your compensation process to deliver more revenue—Don’t just pave the cowpath; explore the latest automation innovations that could help set you down a more productive road.
• Invest in your team—How much more motivated will your team be to work effectively if they’ve had weekends to rest and recharge? Picture what life might be like without constant complaints about commission payments. Your office will not only be a happier place to work, it will be more profitable.

It’s time to ditch the spreadsheet-filled weekends of old. Re-think your plans, open up the weekend, and work less while growing more.