Live demo, built on fictional data
The Comp Ledger
Is the money we pay in incentives buying revenue? One page the CFO and the CRO can argue over with the same numbers. It traces every incentive dollar from last year to what it bought, then lets you re-price the plan, the draws, and the leader plans before 2027 locks.
The same fictional company from The Signal Board and The Plan Builder. B2B software, $42M in recurring revenue at the end of September 2026. Five Enterprise and seven Mid-Market account executives, eight account managers, three SDRs, and four sales leaders below the CRO. The view is the 12 months from October 2025 through September 2026. Every name and figure is made up, but sized the way a company like this really runs.
Is the incentive money buying revenue?
Is the plan paying for discounts?
Share of new-logo bookings, by week of the quarter
Four quarters combined
Average discount, by week of the quarter
Off list price, weighted by deal value
Average discount, by where the rep stood against quota the day the deal closed
Quarter-to-date attainment. The 2026 plan paid accelerators quarterly, starting at 100%. The bottom number is each group’s share of new-logo ARR.
Did we pay for revenue that left?
Account managers: what they were paid on, against what their book did
Each dot is one account manager. Across: expansion booked against quota, which is what the plan paid on. Up: net revenue retention of their book, expansion minus churn and contraction.
Show each account manager's book
New logos that churned in their first year, by where the rep stood against quota at close
Last year's new-logo cohort, before customers moved to account managers. Same quota bands as the discount chart. The bottom number is each band's share of the cohort's ARR.
Did pay follow performance?
Show every person's numbers
Where did each incentive dollar go?
By role
Same scale on every row, so the length is the dollars.
Do the draws pay for themselves?
One new Enterprise AE, month by month
What losing a ramping hire costs
The CRO's side of the scale. Each departure means paying to hire again, paying another ramp, and an empty seat for three months.
Are sales leaders paid on their teams' results?
How does comp show up in S&M efficiency?
Where the S&M dollar went
Sales people cost per $1 of new ARR, by motion
Salary and incentives with payroll burden, sales leaders included. Marketing, tools, and recruiting stay at the company level.
How do the drafts compare?
The CFO's draft and the CRO's draft, against last year's plan and whatever you've set in the panel. Each one re-prices the same 12 months of results and the same 2027 hiring plan.
What this page can prove, and what it can't
It can show where the money went. Every incentive dollar lands in one bucket: paid for results, paid for something else, or paid for nothing yet. That part is accounting, and it's exact.
It can't, by itself, prove the plan caused the revenue. Re-pricing last year under a new plan assumes reps would have sold exactly the same deals. They wouldn't. People respond to how they're paid. That is the whole point of a comp plan, and it cuts both ways. Research on real sales forces shows it. When one manufacturer redesigned its plan around how reps actually responded, revenue rose 9% (Misra and Nair, 2011). At an enterprise software vendor, reps timed deals to hit accelerators and gave up 6 to 8% of revenue in discounts to do it (Larkin, 2014).
How to find out for real
Change one thing, for one group, and keep a comparison group. Roll a new accelerator to Mid-Market in Q1 and Enterprise in Q2, then compare the change in each team against the other. Watch the week-of-quarter curve and the discount curve, not only bookings. A plan that lifts bookings by pulling them forward and pricing them lower hasn't bought revenue. It has rented it.
Want this built on your plan and your payroll before 2027 locks?
It starts with the Comp Plan Audit: your plan, a year of payouts, and your CRM, traced dollar by dollar to what they bought. You keep the model.
Demo built by RevSpan Advisors. All companies, people, and figures are fictional. The model is simplified on purpose. Payouts are computed on annual attainment. The 2026 plan paid accelerators quarterly, and lumpy quarters pay more accelerator than a smooth year, so accelerator spend here is a floor. Draw math uses straight-line commission during ramp. All figures are cash paid, not GAAP expense. Under ASC 340-40, commissions on new contracts are capitalized and amortized, so the P&L shows less in the year they are paid.
Sources: Larkin, I. (2014). The Cost of High-Powered Incentives: Employee Gaming in Enterprise Software Sales. Journal of Labor Economics 32(2), 199–227. Misra, S. and Nair, H. (2011). A Structural Model of Sales-Force Compensation Dynamics: Estimation and Field Implementation. Quantitative Marketing and Economics 9(3), 211–257. Benchmarks: KeyBanc Capital Markets and Sapphire Ventures, private SaaS company survey (2022 data). SaaS Capital, spending benchmarks for private B2B SaaS companies (2026).