How Xactly's Prior Payment Processing (PPP) Improves Payroll

This is a guest post by Pooja Bhatt, Business Consultant at Intangent. 

The payment period is over. Your incentive compensation management solution locked the payment amounts in the previous months. But a change is required for a sales rep’s quota, order amount, compensation amount, or other variable compensation value. How do you keep track of the changes, get everything done before the deadline—and document the adjustments properly for audit purposes?

Prior Period Processing (PPP) is the accounting process of making prior period adjustments to an organization’s financial statements. While it’s necessary process, it can be time-consuming and inefficient when done manually.

The Challenge of Prior Period Processing (PPP)

Prior period adjustments often complicate the payroll process for companies of all sizes, but it must be done. Here’s a real-life example of the challenges the average organization faces with PPP.

John Smith, an Xactly sales administrator finished finalizing the payroll for the month of August and a few days later received a list of changes to be made to a payee’s target incentive and quota.in July.

Given that periods are locked until August, John can’t make these changes in Xactly Incent directly to recalculate. He must pull out his manually maintained compensation sheet and make these changes there and manually recalculate the new commission.

By the time he finishes making these adjustments he receives another list of changes from HR. How will he track all the changes and roll out corrected commissions in time? How reliable is his manual calculation?

To simplify the PPP process, you need a sales performance management solution that automates the process.

Teaming up With Xactly for Easier Prior Period Processing (PPP)

To help improve your productivity, Intangent recently partnered with Xactly and now offers their Prior Period Processing (PPP) function.

With the implementation of PPP, prior period processing becomes as simple as making the required adjustments to the system, initiating a PPP run, and having a new version of results at your fingertips.

Customers who are now using PPP to automate their prior period adjustment process are reporting the following benefits:

• Increased Productivity: Instead of doing prior period processing by hand, Xactly now automates the process and eliminates all manual tasks. You simply run the process with a click of a single button, and the system includes adjustments made for previous periods.
• Reduced Errors: Because you do not have to manually adjust the data and payments, the number of errors are significantly reduced. With the advanced search feature, you can view detailed adjustment information to make sure payments were correctly proceeded.
• Easy Comparison: Once the changes are rolled forward to the current open period, PPP creates a new version of your data. This allows you to review adjustments while comparing the old version to the updated version. With the enhanced user interface, you can see the results both before and after running the PPP tool by using the As of Period option to switch between the versions. You can store up to 12 different versions for each pay period.
• Improved Audit Documentation: By downloading a report on the impact of the adjustments on the payment, you have the information you need, both for reference and auditing purposes. You can also use the Payment Summary report to see balances carrying forward after using the PPP tool on a payment period.
• Increased Flexibility: The PPP tool allows you to make sure all adjustments are accounted for, by running the tool up to five times each month. You also can select the data range you need — there is no cap on how far back you can make adjustments. Because you are not locked out after one time, you can make adjustments as needed, without ever introducing manual errors.

Using the PPP tool, adjusting amounts and data in prior periods is no longer a dreaded, time-consuming, and challenging task. The tool gives you additional time to focus on other areas of your payroll and ensure the accuracy of your payroll for every pay period.

About Intangent

Intangent is a sales performance management consultancy. We work with sales organizations to plan, implement, and manage their sales performance technology solutions. Our commitment to customer success has led to hundreds of successful incentive compensation, territory management and quota planning deployments. Intangent is a privately owned company established in 2005 and headquartered in Toronto.

Ready to learn more about how Xactly’s Prior Period Processing can help you? Discover everything Xactly Incent has to offer.