This article covers the best ways to use Incent, including recommended processes and features for managing your incentive compensation. While these tips are designed to work for most situations, make sure to think about your own business needs to ensure they’re the right fit for you.
If you have any questions or want to chat about how this applies to your team, just reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
Data - Transactional and People
Robust data management is the foundation of any successful incentive compensation program. Ensuring your data flows efficiently, remains accurate, and respects system dependencies is critical to preventing calculation errors and providing your team with a reliable source of truth. The following practices outline how to optimally handle transactional records and participant information within Incent.
- Schedule Integrations: Use integrations to load your transactional information to Incent on a scheduled basis.
- Monitor Logs: Review error and validation logs from your integrations regularly to ensure you are addressing any issues.
- Fix at the Source: Wherever possible, address data issues in the source system rather than adjusting in Incent. This ensures subsequent integration runs don’t overwrite data and keeps your systems in sync.
- Minimize Manual Inputs: Most customers will have a small volume of manual adjustments and one-off data to load, but ideally, this should represent 10% or less of the data you’re loading in a given period.
- Load Period-to-Date (PTD) Data: Load PTDregularly to enable payees to see their incentives stack up as they close sales and help unlock Incent’s ability to motivate reps and drive behavior.
- Limit Object Versioning: Version Organization objects only when there is a true record change, and version as sparingly as possible. Daily versioning is discouraged wherever possible.
- Respect Dependency Order: Update objects in their dependency order (User > Person > Position > Hierarchy > Named Relationship).
- Automate at Scale: Use an integration to manage this data if you’re an org with >500 payees or one with a lot of org movement (e.g., new hires, transfers, terminations).
Configuration & Setup
A scalable, easily maintainable environment requires intentional design from day one. By adopting standardized naming conventions, respecting historical data boundaries, and utilizing isolated testing spaces, you protect the long-term health of your instance. Implement these configuration principles to streamline year-over-year roll-forwards and keep your workspace clutter-free.
- Establish Naming Conventions: Use clear and consistent naming conventions when creating objects so your admin team can understand an object’s function at a glance.
- Keep Objects Year-Agnostic: Do not include the calendar or fiscal year in most configuration objects, except for Plans. This ensures objects remain relevant for multiple years of use without re-creation.
- Follow Dependency Checklists: When creating new calculation components, follow the Xactly University checklist to help ensure you set up all required objects in the right dependency order.
- Plan the Annual Roll-Forward: Follow the Xactly University guide on rolling your instance forward year over year - the main objects you need to migrate (re-create or copy) are Plans, Quotas, Draws, Guarantees, and Process Groups.
- Declutter with Tags: Leverage tags to hide configuration objects and quota assignments from prior years that are no longer relevant. This allows you to remove them from the UI without impacting historical data or system setup.
- Enforce Sandbox Testing: Use the Sandbox environment for testing all new plans, structural changes in Incent, or updates to your integrations before moving them to Production.
- Document Changes: Leverage the Description field on objects to designate changes and additions, and to enable easier migration to Production.
Reporting
Transparency drives performance. Effective reporting not only equips payees and managers with the clarity they need to trust their payouts, but it also gives executive stakeholders actionable insights into sales effectiveness. Use these guidelines to establish a robust, automated reporting rhythm that fosters trust across the organization.
- Provide Clear Statements: Payees should have a clear, easily accessible incentive statement that includes personal details, credit and attainment info, calculated commissions/bonuses, and any draws, adjustments, or other special scenarios that apply to them.
- Enable Manager Drill-Downs: Payees with direct and indirect reports should be able to drill into the same views as their teams, as well as see a summarized view of their team’s performance.
- Align Reporting with Plan Changes: Evaluate payee reporting on the same schedule as your plans change (usually yearly) to ensure changes are captured in these views.
- Establish a System of Record: Incent should be the system of record for your incentive compensation and quota attainment information.
- Encourage On-Demand Executive Review: Non-payees (e.g., finance, leadership, etc.) who need to review compensation information should ideally be enabled to log directly into Xactly and review it on demand.
- Automate Publishing: Report results should be set to auto-publish by enabling the REPORT_PUBLISHING preference in Setup > Preferences.
- Gather Field Feedback: Survey your sales field annually to gather feedback on their experience and ensure Incent is meeting their needs for data visibility and accuracy.
- Leverage Effectivity Analytics: Use the data from Incent for sales effectiveness reporting, including quota distribution curves, pay-for-performance correlation, tenure bucketing, and total cost of sales.
Business Process
System configurations are only as good as the operational workflows supporting them. Establishing cross-trained administrative teams, comprehensive runbooks, and active auditing habits minimizes key-person dependency risks and ensures timely, accurate payroll execution. The protocols below outline the operational guardrails required for seamless processing.
- Maintain an “Xactly Runbook”: Combine your Operations Guide and Processing Calendar into a centralized runbook which ensures your team knows all steps needed to successfully maintain and run your system. This document should explicitly state which steps need to be taken and when they must be completed to ensure successful processing.
- Note: If you don’t have a runbook in place and want to set one up, or would like feedback on your existing runbook, reach out to your Customer Success Manager for assistance.
- Eliminate Single Points of Knowledge: Ensure more than one person knows how to execute all the steps needed to fully process your payments out of Incent, and be able to back each other up when someone is out of the office or needs help.
- Prioritize Certification: Ensure team members take Xactly University training and are Incent-certified.
- Standardize Troubleshooting: When troubleshooting issues, follow the Xactly University method to efficiently trace the steps Incent is moving through and ensure all dependencies are checked.
- Digitalize Sign-Offs: Use Plan Docs in Incent to allow payees to electronically sign off on their compensation plans while dynamically pulling target incentives, quotas, and rates directly into the template.
- You can review our how-to resources here to learn more.
- Finalize Closed Periods: Leverage the “finalize period” feature in Incent after you have completed payouts for that period.
- Standardize Payroll Exports: Have a consistent payroll template as your “final output” from Incent for a period. You can utilize Incent’s out-of-the-box downloads or our data tools such as Connect.
Audit Platform Engagement: Perform regular audits on the percentage of your payees actively logging into the tool using the Login Audit report on the Incent home screen.
- Note: Successful usage of Incent generally corresponds to at least 80% of your payees logging in at least once per pay period.
Conclusion
Getting the best results from Incent means consistently focusing on good data, clear setup rules, transparent reporting, and smart business processes. When your admin team follows the standardized patterns in this guide, you’ll reduce the risk of relying on just one person, avoid payout mistakes, and fully unlock the true motivational power of your incentive plans.
These guidelines are a great starting point, but you should keep checking and adjusting them as your company changes. As your business grows and gets more complex, make sure to work closely with your dedicated Customer Success Manager. They can help you review your system health, fine-tune your administrative processes, and ensure Incent is always delivering maximum value for your organization.
