At Xactly Upside 2026, Trevor Radbill, Senior Commissions Manager at Toast, received the Xactly Creative Problem Solver Award, recognizing an innovative automation that eliminated a recurring compensation challenge and now saves his team hours of manual work. But the award-winning project is just one chapter in a much larger transformation story.
Toast provides restaurant technology that helps businesses manage point-of-sale operations, online ordering, delivery, payments, and reporting. Today, Toast serves restaurants of all sizes and continues to expand its sales organization to support rapid growth.
For Trevor, that growth brings both opportunity and complexity. Over the past five years, Trevor and his team have transformed compensation operations from a largely manual process into a scalable, automated system powered by Xactly.
Key Results
- Eliminated a recurring compensation reporting issue and saved approximately 10 hours per month through automation
- Created a seamless process for assigning credit on deals impacted by employee turnover
- Reduced active rule volume to roughly 30% of its original size, creating a cleaner, more scalable compensation environment
- Automated employee data management through Workday integration, eliminating manual hierarchy uploads
- Improved sales rep visibility into commissions through automated Salesforce and Snowflake integrations
- Streamlined accounting processes through Compensation Expense Accounting (CEA) automation
The Challenge: Scaling Compensation Operations Without Increasing Complexity
When Trevor joined Toast, the company was just beginning its Xactly implementation.The compensation process at the time relied heavily on spreadsheets. Finance managed commissions, but the individual responsible for the process had recently left the company. Reps had little visibility into their earnings and often received commission information only when payouts were due.Data flowed through multiple systems before reaching sales reps, creating delays and a steady stream of questions. Reps lacked transparency into their earnings, and no dedicated team existed to provide answers.
As Toast continued to grow, the challenges became more complex. One particularly frustrating issue involved sales representatives who left the company before their deals went live. While those opportunities remained in Salesforce, managers often lost visibility into future credit for the business. Months later, when deals finally became active, compensation disputes emerged and the compensation team was forced into time-consuming audits to determine who should receive credit.
Every single month there were deals missed,” Trevor said. “We had to create an audit process, and even with that, deals were still getting missed.
At the same time, years of growth had created additional complexity inside the compensation system. Legacy rules, outdated plans, and inactive configurations cluttered the environment and made ongoing administration more difficult.
The Solution: Building Smarter Processes with Xactly
Trevor brought previous Xactly experience with him to Toast, and he immediately saw an opportunity to build a more scalable compensation operation.
The initial implementation introduced Xactly Incent and integrated compensation data with Salesforce and Snowflake, giving sales reps real-time visibility into their earnings. Instead of waiting until payout day, sellers could now track commission activity throughout the month and raise questions before payroll was processed.“It changed everything on the commissions side of things at Toast,” Trevor said.
Over time, Toast expanded its use of Xactly, adding Connect for data transformations and implementing a Workday integration that automatically updates employee records every night. The integration eliminated manual hierarchy uploads and created the foundation for Trevor’s award-winning automation.
When he set out to solve the manager-credit challenge, he partnered with his Xactly Technical Account Manager (TAM) to design a solution in Xactly Connect.The team leveraged versioned employee records from Workday to identify managers associated with terminated sales reps. If a deal later went live, Connect automatically reassigned credit to the appropriate manager using the historical employee record. What once required recurring audits and manual intervention now happens automatically behind the scenes.
Beyond automation, Trevor and his team also launched a major system cleanup initiative. They eliminated outdated rules, removed technical debt, and simplified plan structures to create a cleaner environment for future growth.
The Results: 10 Hours Saved Every Month, and a Foundation for Continued Growth
The project that earned Trevor the Xactly Creative Problem Solver Award transformed a time-consuming manual process into a seamless automated workflow.The automated credit-assignment workflow now saves the compensation team approximately 10 hours every month while eliminating a recurring source of frustration for managers. “We haven't had one issue since we launched that,” Trevor said. “It saves us a lot of time and a lot of manual work.”
The benefits extend far beyond a single workflow. Sales reps now have ongoing visibility into commissions, reducing uncertainty and allowing them to focus more time on selling. Automated Workday integrations eliminated manual administrative tasks from the compensation team's workload. Xactly Connect handles increasingly sophisticated data transformations that support Toast's growing sales organization.
Meanwhile, Toast's cleanup initiative dramatically reduced system clutter, making it easier to manage compensation plans and implement future changes.“It’s almost like starting fresh,”Trevor said. “It helps you build future plans with more confidence.”
The Vision: Empowering Sales Teams Through Automation, AI, and Innovation
Toast continues to grow, introducing new sales teams, and new data sources across the business. Trevor sees automation as the key to supporting that growth without increasing administrative burden.
Looking ahead, Trevor believes Xactly’s growing AI capabilities will play an important role helping Toast scale compensation operations. He envisions AI-powered tools that help sales reps better understand compensation plans, answer routine commission questions, and reduce the volume of inquiries that reach the compensation team. “If AI could answer half the questions that come in, that would be incredible,” he said.He also sees opportunities to further automate onboarding for new sales teams and streamline the flow of increasingly complex Salesforce data into compensation processes.
